Enhancing Student Learning Through Innovative Scholarship (#ESLTIS19) was held this year in the wonderful Edinburgh Napier (July 18-19 2019) (photo credit: Tracey Madden)

Another great conference for those involved with teaching and learning in HE. Highlights for me included:

• A focus on active learning including playfulness, problem based and of course team based learning.
• A great community of academics and practitioners, already committed to innovation in teaching, where the “conversation can start at level 3” to paraphrase the welcoming statement from Prof Alyson Tobin.
• And of course Edinburgh itself (photo credit: Matthew Funnel, who got up earlier than I did!)

What follows is a very partial account of a few personal highlights – there were loads of great talks I didn’t get to see.

After my own pre conference workshop on the use of Team Charters in Team Based Learning, I started to look out for other folks interested in the same theme – basically, empowering students to be accountable for their own learning. Setting their own rules and holding each other to account.  Several folks are looking at peer assessment including Nicola Suter-Giorgini (Leicester), Janet Horrocks (Abertay) and Maria Del Pilar Garcia Souto (UCL) – I had some very helpful conversations with these folks to enhance my own practice.  

I also found it useful to talk to Sarah Gretton and Derek Raine (Leicester) about problem based learning and its relation to team based learning – the two seem quite synergistic and are certainly part of the mix in our own Curriculum Transformation project @UniOfBath.

The conference ended with a wonderful interactive session on active learning led by Robert Hickey and Shaun Ferns from Technological University Dublin involving the collaborative creation of knowledge by the students – which then creates a personalised learning resource, apparently much richer than anything that would fit into a traditional lecture. There is a downloadable handbook on this all

(photo credit Robert Hickey)

As ever, the conference was over all too soon. Roll on #ESLTIS20 in Keele!