Advice on shaping the focus and content of university programmes to ensure they a delivering what students and employers need. These resources looking at co-creation of university curricula, delivering on graduate attributes and future skills, decolonisation, embedding the Sustainable Development Goals into courses, inclusive learning, and adapting to changing societal needs for higher education.

Curricula development

The course I teach, relating to forestry, has a strong focus on balancing conservation and sustainable development. I&nbsp;come from a background focused on integrating these two seemingly irreconcilable paradigms from an integrated landscape approach perspective.We think of landscapes as systems whereby everything is connected in some way. The SDGs provide a fantastic framework to think about such an approach. No single SDG can be dealt with in isolation as they are all equally connected in some way; thus, only by addressing them all can true sustainable development be achieved.The siloed approach to conservation, forestry, agriculture and other land uses has essentially failed us. We believe that getting emerging leaders to think about sustainable development in a holistic way is one way forward.The SDGs underpin the course curriculum and are dealt with in a variety of ways – from mapping the connections between the SDGs and thinking about implementation and progress on targets, to thinking about forestry and agriculture as connected concerns, not in isolation, and considering what other SDGs could be added. The SDGs are the pillar of the learning activities throughout the course.We refer to literature and studies that support such connections such as:From global complexity to local reality: aligning implementation pathways for the Sustainable Development Goals and landscape approachesA policy nexus approach to forests and the SDGs: trade-offs and synergiesMoving online: what worked, what didn’tWhen moving to online teaching, we kept our strong course framework in place while changing the mode of delivery.We quickly discovered that long real-time lectures did not work online.Instead, short, concise recorded presentations of up to 15 minutes long, posted on Canvas prior to a particular online class, enabled students to become familiar with a relevant topics before formal sessions, and they appreciated being able to watch them in their own time.Having an online repository of such resources has also proven useful for revision purposes. Class discussions and assignments were structured around these background materials, which meant the course was constantly referring back to the SDG framework.Rooting the course in the SDGs gives students exposure to real-world issues and problems that they can, and do, explore further.The SDGs as a vehicle for learningThe real benefit of framing a course around the SDGs is that there are so many resources out there that students can explore to augment the classroom instruction and accompanying assignments.Students were comfortable undertaking SDG-related assignments independently knowing that they have access to a wide repository of background information and detail.The students seem to relate to the issues and complexities linked to the SDGs. Using an SDG lens when teaching brings wider issues of society, culture, economics, poverty and food security into students’ thinking about their core subject.In the case of forestry, it helps them to understand just how complex a discipline it is when thinking about long-term sustainable and measurable development. But the SDGs could just as easily be used as a vehicle to pick apart the challenges and complexities of dozens of other disciplines, setting them in a real-world context, while also raising students’ awareness and knowledge of the most pressing issues we, as a planet, now face.Terry Sunderland is a professor in the department of forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia.

Terry Sunderland offers insight on how the Sustainable Development Goals can provide a useful framework to guide students’ learning across multiple disciplines

How to teach through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals

Pardis Mahdavi explains how academics can ensure they support and enhance diversity work in their online teaching through her Jedi – justice, equity, diversity and inclusion – framework 

May the force be with you: driving diversity in online teaching 

The prospect of a transition to technology-based learning had been on the higher education horizon for some time but the trend was slow in coming until the pandemic accelerated its arrival to breakneck speed.

Higher education providers have put virtual teaching, learning and assessment in place so students can continue studying safely at home. Now we need to move beyond emergency measures such as recorded lectures and think about how to better engage students digitally to improve their satisfaction with online learning.

For students to thrive in the new&nbsp;online and blended-learning environment, there has to be nothing short of a wholesale revolution in the way students navigate the digital world and shape their own learning.

Maximising education technology 

Remote learning makes it more important than ever that students understand how to use their university’s IT platforms to best effect.

While it may be straightforward enough for students to access lectures, resources and course materials through the university’s systems, are students confident in using all the features of their VLE or video-conferencing platforms?

Online engagement is critical, and students need to know how to interact with their tutors and fellow students through the university’s designated channels. Keeping track of which students are participating in course-based discussion forums is important, because those who are not involved could be missing out on key information and the opportunity to share topic knowledge.

The process for submission and assessment of work needs to be crystal clear, too. Students may not get&nbsp;the most from feedback on their assignments, for example, if they don’t&nbsp;know how to open and read the comments that have been made about their piece of work.

The shift to online teaching does not always come naturally, even to the most gifted instructor. According to the Office for Students, many providers are organising training sessions for academic staff on digital skills and the core principles of digital pedagogy.

They quote the example of “star teachers”&nbsp;– who had been early adopters of digital teaching and learning – presenting in collaboration with learning technologists on topics&nbsp;such as how to foster a sense of community when teaching online.

Upskilling the digital native 

It’s all too easy to assume that Generation Z, the first generation to have grown up with the internet, will be naturals at navigating the online world. It’s certainly true that many students conduct their lives through their smartphones and can communicate their feelings eloquently through a pithy image or meme.

This does not automatically mean a digital native can successfully learn online.

The authors of a paper entitled “Moving on from millennials: preparing for Generation Z”&nbsp;suggest that while students’ ability to obtain information from online sources seems impressive, they lack the ability to critique the validity of the information and are likely to get frustrated if answers are not clear immediately.

While Generation Z know their way around digital technology, they still need to learn how to use it effectively to support learning. Institutions have a responsibility to provide a structured programme to teach students how to identify, research and interpret content they find online.

With more information available than ever before, students should not simply be consumers of content, they should be learning how to curate that content for the purposes of their learning.

Self-directed learning 

For students to succeed, they need the motivation to work independently. This is particularly the case when much of the learning is being carried out online.

However, in the UK, like many other countries, our education systems have not been set up to encourage independent learning. Students find themselves propelled along a trajectory of GCSE to post-16 qualification to degree, and understandably the focus is on getting good grades.

That’s why universities have an important role to play in helping students explore their subjects more widely by encouraging them to question the content they find online and reflect on how this adds to their knowledge.

Technology alone will never replace good teaching. The best environment for self-directed learning is one where it becomes second nature for students to seek out knowledge and push the barriers of their understanding under the guidance of a lecturer.

Self-directed learning not only helps students succeed in their studies, it also prepares them for the changing nature of the workplace. Today’s careers landscape favours those who invest time, energy and passion in their careers by continually refining their existing skills and mastering new ones – through independent learning.

As universities reopen for face-to-face teaching, online learning will continue to be an evolving element of any higher education course. By equipping students with the digital and self-learning skills to navigate the information age, we are setting them up to succeed in their studies, and in their future careers.

Nikita Hari is a lecturer in electronics, a Schlumberger Fellow at the University of Oxford and a board member of Proprep UK, an online higher education learning technology and resources provider.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 

Universities need to help students develop a whole new set of skills to ensure they get the most out of remote learning, says Nikita Hari 

Training students to learn successfully online 

Gunter Saunders explains how to design courses that engage and incentivise students to gain the digital skills they need to flourish in the online learning environment and beyond 

Lessons in developing digital capability courses for students 

Educational technologist Roland Sherwood explains how faculty can get the most from their work with digital experts to enhance online teaching

How to enhance collaboration between faculty and digital teams

Covid-19 has accelerated the inevitable digital transformation within academia. With university teaching moved online, academics and educators are being forced to think “digital first”.Yet despite widespread acknowledgement of the importance of leveraging digital tools to engage students, public-facing digital output and impact initiatives are still seen as extra “distractions from more traditional forms of productivity”, as Tristan Grunow of Pacific University argues.He highlights how existing methods of internal and external evaluation, used for hiring decisions and tenure, provide little incentive for scholars to value digital scholarship and public engagement work.I set out to reimagine this relationship by designing an ambitious module that placed public-facing digital output at the centre of the course.The project demonstrated that when approached in an integrated manner, public impact initiatives can be highly effective in reinforcing core pedagogical goals.Here, I outline three examples that provide important insights to help university educators meet the mounting and interconnected challenges of public relevance, inclusive education, community engagement, communicating research to diverse audiences, cross-sector collaboration and student employability.Digital firstAs part of a Literature &amp; Society course exploring Afro-Japanese encounters at Rikkyo University, the first step to going digital was to produce a bilingual introductory video that gave an overview of class content.The students commented on how refreshing it was to be welcomed back to a new semester with an introduction that did not lament the continued need for virtual teaching. Rather, the video explained how the students would be able to develop digital skills and get involved in public engagement. I&nbsp;edited the video to be engaging and appealing to audiences beyond the university, giving the public a snapshot of what we learn via social media.In addition to communicating key messages, the video visualised and brought to life through image and sound frequently hidden Afro-Japanese connections, in line with one of the main class objectives.Resources for fostering creativity in higher educationHow to be a civic university post pandemic Enhance your research through public engagement and collaborationCollaboration outside the academy&nbsp;A collaboration with the British Embassy in Japan to develop a more inclusive cultural diplomacy strategy in response to the Black Lives Matter movement provided the first public engagement opportunity for students.Our class created a package of online content in Japanese to share as part of the embassy’s first ever Black History Month campaign.Students curated a Black History Month Spotify playlist that they thought would appeal to a Japanese audience. Their artist and song selections led to deeper critical class discussions about how Japan has “gazed” at Britain historically and in what forms Japanese people wish to consume “blackness”.We went from passively learning about Afro-Japanese pasts to making history by proactively creating Afro-Japanese futures. This shows how digital platforms offer a crucial vehicle for the humanities to make timely, influential contributions to pressing issues in society.Giving assignments real-world contextsFor the final assignment, students were asked to imagine the future of Afro-Japanese interactions rooted in our class discussions. Led by their personal interests and building on their skills, they produced a series of digital projects that expressed Afro-Japanese futures.Students gave the task rave reviews as one of their most memorable university experiences. It not only offered much-needed respite from the everyday grind of lockdown learning but also enabled them to explore how their individual interests and strengths could be applied to different fields.One student who was interested in the intersection between entertainment and political commentary produced a trap rap video satirising the Japanese government’s response to the pandemic. Another interested in tourism produced a “green book” tourist map of Japan to illustrate how a “black gaze” could reimagine Japan’s tourism industry. A student passionate about dancing invented a new style of movement that merged aesthetics from Afrobeats and traditional Japanese dance.The project was an opportunity for the students to freely discover how they could practically translate their passions and liberal arts education into real-world contexts.Alongside my internal grading, I&nbsp;partnered with an influential creative agency, Melanin Unscripted, to judge and honour the best projects. This academia-industry partnership, linking the curriculum with the workplace and market trends, focused attention on student employability and how humanities training could be applied in innovative ways to business, government policy or other public-private organisations.I partnered with black-owned and local businesses in Tokyo to provide prizes and strengthen the university’s links with the local community.I discovered that a more creative project-based approach was far more inclusive than limiting assessment to traditional essays or exams. This was partly due to varying levels of English fluency within our class but also because some students’ strengths lie elsewhere.All the projects will be publicly available to view from anywhere in the world via our class’s virtual reality gallery, with written explanations via an online Medium publication, from 15&nbsp;February 2021.Using the practical to reinforce the theoreticalA key barrier to greater public-facing digital output in academia is the perception that the “practical” distracts or detracts from the theory.However, this initiative to create future Afro-Japanese encounters and exhibit them to the public in a virtual space was informed by and reinforced core theoretical lessons of our course.It helped students probe more deeply into questions related to space and time that our course seeks to critically engage with: in what spaces, imaginary or real, have Afro-Japanese encounters taken place? Is it possible to imagine futures without a past?I hope projects like these will support the promotion of digital scholarship for public engagement from its minor status as an “add-on” to a valuable tool that can be creatively leveraged to enhance learning and achieve major goals within higher education.Warren Stanislaus is an associate lecturer in the Global Liberal Arts programme at Rikkyo University and a PhD candidate in modern Japanese history at the University of Oxford.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Having been pushed to the sidelines of academia for too long, public engagement projects can take a central role in digital courses, furthering students’ learning and reaching wider audiences, explains Warren Stanislaus

Using digital scholarship to enhance public engagement

“Academic language is…no one’s mother tongue,” wrote Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron; for our students, developing successful academic writing habits can be a source of significant difficulty and stress.&nbsp;Supporting students to develop academic writing abilities is key to building their&nbsp;confidence and resilience in the face of assessment and feedback. For students, good writing skills will be fundamental to successful progress through their courses.&nbsp;This is particularly important following the move to online learning, with the associated upheaval and uncertainty that have left a lot of students feeling anxious and isolated.&nbsp;Therefore, the earlier universities intervene to develop and enhance these writing abilities, the better.&nbsp;How we do this?&nbsp;At the University of Glasgow, we take a whole-institution approach to improve students’ academic writing.&nbsp;All 11,000 incoming undergraduate and postgraduate taught students complete a compulsory writing course, receiving feedback and guidance on their writing within the first four weeks of enrolment at the university.&nbsp;&nbsp;The course – the Academic Writing Skills Programme (AWSP)&nbsp;– involves submission of an essay within the first two weeks of semester. Students have a choice of essay questions, covering the broad range of subjects taught, and have freedom in how they answer.&nbsp;&nbsp;They are provided with pre-submission guidance on the core elements of academic writing within their subject areas&nbsp;alongside resources on grammar, marking criteria, academic integrity and so on.&nbsp;All students receive feedback within 10 days. A team of learning developers and graduate teaching assistants mark non-stop to provide meaningful, actionable, tailored feedback.&nbsp;&nbsp;Students have three routes to completion. Most are judged as having completed&nbsp;the programme and offered optional further study. Some students are referred to compulsory&nbsp;asynchronous courses, which are subject specific and allow them to work at their own pace through interactive resources. Finally, other students are referred for two weeks of compulsory synchronous online classes; these are taught by graduate teaching assistants and cover core elements of academic writing. On completion, students submit another essay for further feedback.&nbsp;&nbsp;Why this works&nbsp;&nbsp;This system provides targeted, meaningful early intervention to improve students’ abilities in academic writing. For most students, the course is their first experience of assessment and coursework at the institution. It is designed to be a light-touch, developmental opportunity.The course highlights students’ needs from the start. We can track individual students who are at a higher risk of dropping out by tracking their engagement with, and results on, the course.We can also use the data gathered from large-scale assessment to understand overall student demographics. As a result, we are able to highlight and target at-risk cohorts to provide more academic development opportunities.More importantly, this supportive feedback from the learner development department, as one of the students’ first interactions with the university, helps build feelings of support, confidence and resilience. It provides students with the techniques, materials and contacts required to succeed in their assessments.Key lessons in creating an academic writing course onlineHaving moved the programme online, we were worried that students wouldn’t engage with the content or build the early friendships we encourage through the classes.But we were proved&nbsp;wrong: students relished the opportunity to work on their writing in a more asynchronous fashion, then used the live classes for discussion and interrogation.The overwhelmingly positive student feedback, alongside a near-universal student course completion rate, points to the success of the online delivery.&nbsp;Improving academic writing is like learning to play an instrument: with ongoing practice, reflection and feedback, we make steady improvement. The AWSP allows us to provide every student with a chance to reflect on, and improve, their academic writing.For institutions looking to adopt any kind of large-scale online academic writing courses, here are some key takeaways:Make it relevant:&nbsp;Students will engage with such early intervention if, and only if, it is tailored for and relevant to their studies. Generalised, non-specific work will not be well received.Flip the classroom:&nbsp;A flipped-classroom approach to delivering and teaching content has been so successful that we will continue to use it in years to come, whether online or in person.&nbsp;Prep an army of markers:&nbsp;Providing timely, personalised feedback for 11,000 students is a challenge. But with a large group of markers, a bank of pre-formatted, but individualised, feedback statements and efficient online systems, it is possible.&nbsp;Trust your staff:&nbsp;The dedication of the graduate teaching assistants, and their ability to maintain good humour, is vital to the success of the programme. Without such a dedicated team, it would not work.&nbsp;Early intervention: Early signposting of sources and resources to students&nbsp;is essential to building confidence. Providing students with information on key elements of their assessments, in a targeted rather than blanket way, encourages student awareness and engagement.&nbsp;Clear communications: We engage with students in a range of ways: email, YouTube videos, our virtual learning environment, social media, (usually face-to-face) discussion. This range of communications means students are aware of the programme requirements and know who to contact if they have any questions.&nbsp;Keep it flexible: We allow students flexibility in the questions they choose, the approaches they take, and the ways they submit the work. Students can answer questions in advance, then upload the work, or they can treat it as a timed assessment and write within a time period. Flexibility means we can cater for varied student needs and preferences.&nbsp;Good design: A well-designed and smooth online process is key to student participation. Failures in technology or difficulties in finding ways around systems will instantly put a block between students and their work.&nbsp;To quote lecturer and graduate teaching assistant Kate Mathis: “Witnessing students’ realisation that formerly unclear and annoying aspects of grammar improve dramatically when these are clearly explained and understood is the most rewarding part of teaching for AWSP, which provides a rare and valuable opportunity to devote specific attention to improving students’ academic writing&nbsp;in the earliest weeks of their time in Glasgow.”&nbsp;Andrew Struan is writing and study skills co-ordinator at the University of Glasgow.&nbsp;

Academic writing skills are fundamental to most university courses. Andrew Struan explains how Glasgow has taken a whole-university approach to ensure all students are well equipped to succeed 

Improving academic writing skills to boost student confidence and resilience 

Digital skills are key to the future employability of most graduates. Jo Coldwell-Neilson advises on how to embed digital literacy training into all aspects of online higher education 

Developing students’ digital skills through online learning

Advice on shaping university curricula, including co-creation, work skills, decolonisation, embedding SDGs, inclusive learning, virtual and large-scale programmes

Curricula development

How to teach through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals

May the force be with you: driving diversity in online teaching

Training students to learn successfully online

Lessons in developing digital capability courses for students

How to enhance collaboration between faculty and digital teams

Using digital scholarship to enhance public engagement

Improving academic writing skills to boost student confidence and resilience

Developing students’ digital skills through online learning

Discover

More from THE

Sign up

Collaborate with THE

About

Legal stuff