Sally Brown

Following on from my posting on 13th March, Kay Sambell and I have subsequently both been asked by colleagues for advice on how to move from having invigilated on-site exams to having students sit written assessments online from home, so we’ve put together a second informal guide as an open educational resource posted here: Kay-Sambell-Sally-Brown-Coronavirus-Contingency-Suggestions-for-replacing-on-site-exams-w.docx (4185 downloads)

Please feel free to circulate and use it. You are very welcome to customize it for your local contexts, but please acknowledge its origins if you do so (and it would be very interesting for us if you let us know how you have used it!)

Meanwhile, Phil and I are staying safe at home and working hard exercising, mentoring, gardening, spring cleaning and using or time constructively: the two photos show one result of my current obsession with sourdough in the form of a pizza and my newly alphabetized fiction shelves!

I hope you can, like us, enjoy any moments you can in these horrid times. Stay safe, keep well and don’t work too hard.

In the last week, Kay Sambell and I have been exploring what kinds of alternative assessments can be used by universities when face-to-face attendance for exams and other assessments isn’t possible.
I was very grateful to the #LTHEchat in adding to our work with very helpful comments via Thursday night’s additional tweetchat. Our preliminary guidance note is attached here: Contingency-planning-exploring-rapid-alternatives-to-face-to-face-assessment-w.docx (3993 downloads)
We are sharing it in the hope that it is useful to colleagues. Please regard it as an Open Resource that you are free to modify and share: it would probably be of most value to you if you cut and paste the bits that are useful, chuck out the bits that are not useful, customize your examples where you use different platforms from the ones we mention, add links to their specific guidance, and add in links to your own university’s regulations plus any specific contingency plans you have made.

This week Phil and I are celebrating our roles as Visiting Professors at Edge Hill University by supporting the amazing NTF, John Bostock, at the Evaltrends 2020conference  in Spain. The photos show Sally and John in action, and participants working.
It’s lovely to see friends and colleagues from Spain and Australia here, including Victor Lopez Pastor, Jan McArthur and David Boud, and to make lots of new connections too! Phil and I are now in Seville for a short holiday, and the sun is still shining!

With the weather being so terrible, I’ve been grateful I’ve had a quiet week this week, with no long distance travelling. So i’ve been working with Phil on our chapter on assessment and feedback to improve learning for the forthcoming new edition of Denise Chalmers and Lynne Hunt’s book on University Teaching in Focus for Routledge. We will be including three brand-new case studies from Ruth Cochrane and Richard Firth of Edinburgh Napier University, Fiona Meddings of Bradford University and Mark Glynn of Dublin city University, which are terrific.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about how people can make the best case for promotion on the grounds of teaching and research: certainly plenty of opportunities for reflection.
And alongside that I’ve done a bit of baking: Phil says the lemon drizzle cake is delicious!

I’m back up again in EdinburghNapier this week helping colleagues in the School of Nursing and Social Care to think in detail about curriculum design and delivery aspects of their program in advance of their reaccreditation. It’s a privilege to work with Professor Kay Sambell on this  and with health colleagues there who are doing so much to enhance the student experience. The slides I will be using are here: Napier-6th-Feb-SBKSw.pptx (591 downloads)

Today I’m heading up to Edinburgh Napier University to help to support the re-accreditation of nursing programs. I am also looking forward to catching up with Kay Sambell and continuing with our research and publishing work.
The journey up to Edinburgh is one of the most scenic rail routes in Britain alongside the sea, with views of Alnmouth (see photo) and Holy Island.

After a very interesting and successful visit to Galway University last week I am down in London for a workshop for student governors run by Advance HE, where I am contributing with Dr Michelle Morgan to a panel about teaching excellence and the student experience.
But yesterday Michelle and I spent a brilliant afternoon at the V&A where I loved lots of things but especially the jewellery gallery. Here I am in the tearoom!

January is principally a home-based month for me after the hectic nature of the period before Christmas, so I am spending some time updating this website, which has been seriously neglected for some years now, after a fabulous foody and family festive period.

I’m also experiencing low level labyrinthitis which means that I can’t look at screens too much, which requires me to reduce my social media profile. However, doing a little at a time, I’m  trying to enliven my website by stripping out outdated material, and committing to more blog posts in the future, as well as my regular updates on work in hand.

One new feature of my 2020 work, however, will be supporting the University of Galway in Ireland in their endeavours to make senior appointments on the grounds of excellence in learning and teaching, which means I will be visiting them regularly, with my first visit on the 16th of January: yippee!

My plans for February are also low-key, as I celebrate my 70th birthday by not doing much work! Sounds good to me.

This week sees the last of my planned Southampton Visits to work at Solent University on curriculum enhancement matters. On Wednesday I will be doing a workshop on assessment and feedback in which I will be playing The Biscuit Game Activity-1-The-Biscuit-Game.pdf (596 downloads) to raise issues around assessment literacy. I will also work on Wednesday and Thursday with three more teams on improving student engagement and satisfaction. Thank you so much to Julie Hall, Karen Arm and Karen Heard-Laureote for making me so welcome at the University.
Thanks also to Martha Caddell at Heriott Watt University for this week releasing a link to some resources Phil and I created in the summer, and in particular, mine today for people who are very new to marking, this link should open Twitter and get you there: https://twitter.com/LTA_HWU/status/1204388391992856578?s=20

Now a link to a ‘Box Set’ on the youtube channel of resources made by Phil and I at Heriot Watt:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmhOCPbOa9jVMDVKufGLuGw

On Friday at Newcastle University in room NUBS  2.08 on the second floor of the Business School  (near St James Park Metro station) I will be running the North East’s Road Show in which I will be explaining how the 2020 National Teaching Fellowship scheme will work. If you are thinking of going for NTF this year or in the future, do come along, even if you haven’t registered with Advance HE’s website for this free event. You are very welcome if you work in UK higher education, or teach at HE level in an FE college, wherever you live, but particularly in the north-east! Hope to see you there.

And then happy Christmas one and all, because that will be the end of my work for 2019 (apart of course from residual desk work!)