Funding awarded to projects enhancing the 1st year experience

The University’s Centre for Learning and Teaching is delighted to announce that it has been able to support a number of projects aiming to enhance the learning experience for 1st year students.

An award has been made to seven members of staff as part of the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Programme 2007/08. 

The annual competitive awards, which have a changing yearly theme, are designed to help academic staff carry out new and exciting projects which are over and above their normal course activities and to disseminate good practice throughout the institution.

Members of staff were invited to consider ways in which they as an individual, or as a member of a discipline, School or College, might enhance any aspect of the first year experience of our students. This could involve the scholarly comment on a current innovation, the introduction of a new activity or undertaking a piece of relevant research.

This year, the winning projects included:

• the production of student displays on 20^th century European history;
• the use of mobile technologies to support field-based learning in Geosciences;
• novel formative assessment for students of French;
• a longitudinal study of student experience and conceptions, led by the Centre for Learning and Teaching, to aid revision of 1^st year teaching in Geosciences;
• the development of 'pre-lab' on-line resources by the Centre for Lifelong Learning to help students new to science understand basic practical work in Chemistry;
• a competitive challenge to 1^st year Ecology and Environmental Science students to interpret their experience of the Campus environment in any 'arts' medium; and
• a review of the attitudes of 2^nd-4^th year Medical Science students to their 1^st year experience.

Mark Young, Academic Director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching, was delighted by the standard of applications. He said: "We had 18 applications for funds and the standard was excellent.  It was extremely difficult narrowing the entries down as we could only support seven of these. 

"We hope that the range and innovative nature of the chosen projects will really help enhance the learning experience of our 1^st year students and that next year we can attract equally exciting ideas."