Blank slate thinking

It seems we’ve made the decision to standardise our first year teaching mode to two hours of content delivery, with one hour weekly for class discussion.  At the moment, more than half teach in this way, but some disciplines offer shorter lectures and longer discussion.  It’s a classic bit of historical untidiness, like an uneven streetscape in an area destined for gentrification. Straightening this out will make our individual workloads easier to calibrate, and in turn this will make everything…

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Waiting to engage

‘Student engagement’ is a feel-good term.  We don’t really know what it is, but we want more of it. Like anything we want more of, we need to think of ways of measuring it, so that we can check that we’re tracking in the right direction. In Australia and New Zealand, we measure it with the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE), which matches closely and deliberately to the US National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), so that we can…

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