W/B 14th November 2011

Monday and Tuesday I had a range of meetings with various staff across the University.

Wednesday I attended Heads of Educational Development Group (HEDG) net work of all Heads across the UK. There was a presentation at this about student engagement and how to include them in enhancement from Bath University. This was interesting and led to a lot of discussion about how students now want to be partners in their learning. There are some really interesting projects going so Bath are running a student scheme of shadowing senior managers in the University so they understand their role too and Exeter University now have students on lecturer appointment panels and on University finance committees really interesting.

There was then a discussion around the revised UKPSF and how now there was a clear Senior Fellow and Principal Fellow route. This led to discussion about how HESA will ask in March/April of next year for institutional data on who is a qualified lecturer and who has HEA fellowship as academics etc although this will not published in 2012 but will be in 2013. Lots of places now starting to explore this we have not but I will add this to list of keeping an eye on and discuss with HR how data might be possible to collect through the academic CV if this goes into a database.

There was also a discussion about HEDG having got one of the JISC digital literacies bids and how this was to explore how Heads contributed to this in their institution. There was a debate about what this really means and several definitions are now around.

The afternoon finished with Gina Wisker feeding back on the follow up research that has been done on Educational Centres furthering David Gosling’s earlier work.

Thursday and Friday I was at the SEDA Autumn conference both presenting but also as the now co-chair of the conference committee which I took over on May 2011. You can all see some of the conference presentation notes from both Olivia and myself on the conference blog.