Usher Education Forum: The Future of Teaching and Learning

Theme: The Future of Teaching and Learning

The event provides a friendly atmosphere in which to share ideas and best practice around the theme of ‘The future of teaching and learning’. The event is open to all staff with an interest in teaching, learning and assessment.

Programme

 Plenary: Prof Sian Bayne

Near Future Teaching: designing a values-based future for digital education at Edinburgh

Within universities there is a growing trend to apply futures and design thinking to teaching and learning, often as a way of understanding how digital shifts are affecting education. These initiatives tend to be characterised by their focus on speculative, big ideas, and by collaborative approaches which engage with as wide a group of people as possible.

The recent project here at Edinburgh – Near Future Teaching – applied ‘futures’ work to digital education specifically for this university, enabling a wide conversation to take place among students and staff around how we would like to see digital education grow over the coming decades, and from that to build a vision for the university which balances technological change with the values of our academic and student body.

In this talk I will discuss how we went about co-designing the future with a large, diverse academic and student body. I will make connections between the preferred future we defined and the education programme for the Edinburgh Futures Institute. By sharing lessons from this work I will argue that academic communities need to be active in defining a preferred future according to our values, at a time when rapid technological change is often assumed to be driving the way we teach and learn.

Sian Bayne is Professor of Digital Education and Assistant Principal for Digital Education at The University of Edinburgh. She is also Director of Education at the new Edinburgh Futures Institute. She directs the Centre for Research in Digital Education, where her research is currently focused on higher education futures, interdisciplinary approaches to researching digital education and digital pedagogy. More information about her work is on her web site.

Parallel Workshops

1. Bespoking Near Future Teaching aims and indicative actions into Usher Institute Teaching and Learning (Michael Gallagher) This workshop will build on the plenary by first discussing the aims and indicative actions emerging from the Near Future Teaching project before engaging in a short design workshop exploring how these might be expressed in teaching and learning activities at the Usher Institute. The goal in this workshop is to see how findings from this project might help us rethink our own teaching and learning practices.

2. Collaborative and integrated learning (Rosemary Geddes and Ruth McQuillan) Drawing on their experience in the online MPH team the facilitators will discuss the advantages/disadvantages and the barriers/facilitators of integrated and collaborative learning within and between disciplines.