Sally Brown

‘Assessing Students in Large Groups’ is the topic for today’s workshop at Edinburgh University where I am working with course organizers and giving them a keynote on this crucial topic. The slides for the session are here, and like all my presentations, are open educational resources.  Edinburgh Slides (563 downloads)

On Friday 27 February  I am offering a seminar in the Irish National Forum for the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education series on the Taught Masters Experience at Carlow Institute of Technology.  It’s great to be back in Ireland again working with colleagues keen to think how they work best with students at this level. My slides for the workshop are here: M-level slides (466 downloads)

Today (25 February) I am supporting Nursing colleagues at ARU developing a new curriculum for their students in conjunction with their practice partners, and the slides I am using are here.  ARU Feb 2015 (561 downloads)
My current work on the Anglia Ruskin Transforming Assessment project concludes on Thursday 26th February with a final assessment design intensive with a course team and further support work.

Wednesday 18th February provides me with an opportunity to return to York St John University where I will be spending the morning running a workshop  on designing, teaching and assessing taught  Masters programmes, then working with teams on aligned topics in the afternoon. My principal slides for the day are here: M level slides (433 downloads)

Today as well as running a workshop on applying  for  HEA Principal Fellowships at City University (slides and handout here: UKPSF slides 2015 (667 downloads) ) I spent a really enjoyable afternoon working with colleagues there developing a viable and potentially useful educational development strategy with them. I look forward to seeing the ultimate outcome.
The venue was one of the best venues I have ever run training in: @wallacespace  in Clerkenwell. It had flexible, light colourful rooms, superbly equipped for workshops with a continuous supply of nuts, snacks, biscuits, sweets and hot and cold drinks. Great for collaborative working.

What a real pleasure it has been working at Plymouth this week encouraging part time academics and learning support staff to apply for Associate Fellowship of the HEA (as well as supporting others going for other levels). As far as I am aware Plymouth is the only university aiming to get high numbers of their Associate Lecturers and learning supporters to get AFHEA accreditation.  Around 55 worked with me this week and seem to be well on the way to doing it. Congratulations to PVC Pauline Kneale for leading this great initiative and to Priska, Lucy and others for running a great, well-formulated accredited scheme.

This week I am really delighted to be working with Plymouth Associate Lecturers on an intensive week as part of what I believe to be an unique drive to encourage all associate lecturers to achieve Associate Fellowship of the HEA. I will be back again in October running briefing sessions three times a day to familiarise as many as possible part-time staff with the Plymouth scheme requirements. I am also providing one-to-one support for this and other categories of HEA Fellowship as required.  PVC Pauline Kneale and I are very pleased with the turn out!

This week Margaret Price and I are again working on enhancing assessment practice at ARU. As you can see from my twitter feed, great fun was had with the group assessment practical task, the slides for the workshop are here.   ARU Jan 2015 (493 downloads) Those present will know we barely looked at the slides, busy as we were with the assessed task, so I hope they prove useful to participants in a kind of ‘backward flipped’ way!

The last two Faculty days, and the last three ‘Assessment Design Intensives’ are taking place this week before we move on to the next phase of supporting the devising of an assessment compact.

This week Phil and I are contributing to the Geosciences Department’s Assessment Week at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. We are being made very welcome here and look forward to learning from contributions from our Dutch colleagues as well as making our own presentations. Mine are here: Streamlining assessment (629 downloads) ,   Assessing more students (425 downloads) Peer assessment (735 downloads)

The Transforming Assessment project at Anglia Ruskin I am co-leading with Margaret Price of Oxford Brookes University continues in 2015, with a series of faculty away-days and Assessment Design Intensives in January for courses wishing to enhance assessment and feedback. It was really pleasing to see the significant improvements ARU colleagues made last year to assessment and feedback, as evidenced in their much improved NSS scores , and we were very happy to play a part in this. The briefing note for the ADIs and the Power Point presentation for my input to the Faculty of Science and Technology away-day are here. ARU slides (466 downloads) , Briefing Note (504 downloads)