Higher Education Teaching and Learning

A publication which assists project teams with planning and implementation of tertiary teaching and learning projects.

This publication assists project teams to plan and implement tertiary teaching and learning projects that bring about change in teaching practice.

 

This short publication is designed to help prospective project teams interested in improving teaching and learning scope out what this means in terms of project planning and implementation.

 

Our experience to date tells us that achieving sustainable change through projects requires careful planning and ongoing effort. The life of a project often extends beyond the funded timeframe of ‘doing the work’ and includes both socialising of ideas within organisations, as well as ongoing promotion and implementation of the work once completed. Successful project teams clearly communicate the relevance of the work to gain buy-in, and link well with existing networks to gather momentum and excitement for the work as it develops.

 

Critically, the successful impact of a project depends on a clear demonstration of learner benefit. There are, of course, no one-size fits all approaches here. This guide is designed to assist in formulating questions and approaches in the particular context of the project. We trust it will be useful for those charged with leading organisational development in terms of teaching and learning. The publication is also designed to assist individuals and teams developing grant applications for project funding.

 

This publication is related to A tertiary practitioner's guide to collecting evidence of learner benefit, which was also prepared by Anne Alkema to provide an introduction to the process of collecting evidence of learner benefit.

This National Project Fund project examined the extent to which teaching practices are informed by learner feedback in New Zealand tertiary institutions.

 

This project investigated tertiary teachers’ views of, and engagement with, feedback gathered through student evaluations. The study drew on a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques; in all, 1,065 staff from 3 institutions (1 polytechnic and 2 universities) participated in a questionnaire and 60 volunteers were interviewed.

This study highlights the need for greater use of student evaluation as an integral part of professional development. Closing the loop is introduced as a principle to encourage individual teachers, departments and organisations to:

provide evidence to demonstrate the quality of teaching to government, to staff, to colleagues, to students and other stakeholders enable planning for ongoing personal, professional, course/programme and institutional development enable students to be involved in development activities and give them a voice in the quality aspects of their tertiary experience.

Two outputs are available from this project: a research report and a summary guide.

Ako Aotearoa’s vision is the best possible educational outcomes for all learners. Achieving this vision has many dimensions, but a critical part is to develop more effective teaching and learning. This is an increasing challenge when, on the one hand, we are operating in times of inevitable resource constraints and on the other we are continually being urged to engage with new social and learning technologies to extend our practice.Immediately this raises a question: “how do we know what is effective practice?” How do we test our assumptions about what is working for our learners and what is not? On the surface this is an obvious and fundamental question, but across the sector we have been surprised at the relatively small number of practitioners who systematically gather and use evidence of how learners do or do not benefit from different approaches to teaching.