HEA accreditation get-togethers… A4

Another fortnight, another get-together to talk about our portfolios for the HEA fellowship accreditation. This time we talked about A4 – Develop effective learning environments and approaches to student support and guidance.

At Fellow level we need to give evidence of our debelopment of a learning environment, for example

• examples of an online environment
• mentoring or tutoring plans and notes
• photos of equipment, exhibitions, etc. in a relevant setting

At Senior Fellow level we need to give evidence of our managing the development of learning environments and support, for example

• organising personal tutoring
• setting up online environments
• organising exhibitions, placements, etc.

We talked about how we support, set up and manage both online environments  for modules (and particularly the tools here that go beyond the mere information delivery of putting up lecture slides, for examples the use of discussion forums, blogs, wikis) and also resources (different ways of accessing our in-house research collection) as well as the ‘old-fashioned’ not quite as virtual environments we create – and why sometimes the one is more appropriate than the other. Actually we thought what would probably be an important factor in our annotation of our individual examples would be exactly this explanation – why did we choose to set it up this way, with reference to the content and skills we teach, and the type of students we interact with.

We ended by having a little chat about the references. Each of us needs to references, which should be provided by somebody who knows our teaching, so we thought about who we could ask.

Next time: A5 – Engaging in continuing professional development in subjects/disciplines and their pedagogy, incorporating research, scholarship and the evaluation of professional practices.