Last week the second annual Learning and Teaching Symposium was delivered, fully online.
The UNE Learning and Teaching Symposium is an institution-wide celebration of the outstanding learning and teaching and scholarship of teaching and learning that takes place at UNE.
At this year’s Symposium, we were able showcase those innovative and positively impactful learning and teaching practices that have supported our students through the difficult times over the past year.
The Symposium theme Above and Beyond reflects how UNE as an institution has been able to rise above and move beyond the challenges we have faced. The purpose of the Symposium was to facilitate the thinking of the UNE community about new directions in learning and teaching practices as we move into a Post-COVID future.
For this year’s, Symposium there were 172 registered attendees. The Symposium ran across four sessions plus a keynote speaker giving a total of 13 presentations. This was an expanded program from the 2020 symposium which offered 10 presentations. Sessions were well attended with an average of 60 attendees per session.
This year’s Keynote was Professor Stephen Dobson, Dean of Faculty of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. Stephen’s keynote was titled Assessment and the freedom to learn and teach – paradise learnt and regained? Stephen spoke about future directions for assessment with a focus on assessment as learning where students are their own assessors, monitoring their own learning, asking questions, and using assessment information for new learning.
The keynote was followed by a panel session that explored the questions – Can we reclaim paradise lost? What might ‘assessment paradise’ look like at UNE? Conversation focused on the value of student driven assessment, that is flexible, inclusive, fair, and valid.
The four sessions of presentations that followed represented both the breadth and depth of education excellence at UNE. This was reflected in the session titles:
• Reimagining Learning! Post-COVID Futures
• All the world’s a stage (coach)! Presentations and collections
• Virtually there! Virtual Learning Environments and
• All things students! Student well-being, success, and motivation.
The final session, Where to from here? provided an opportunity to reflect upon the Symposium itself and future directions for UNE.
Upon registering for the Symposium, attendees were asked three questions: What they hoped to get out of the Symposium? What are the lessons learned or ideas and/or practices you might build upon post-COVID19? What is one area of learning and teaching you would like to know more about? During this final session, word clouds of the responses to these questions were presented.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the most oft-repeated word was ‘students’, followed by ‘engagement’, ‘teaching’ and ‘ideas’. These succinctly sum up what we value at UNE.
The Symposium was closed by our DVC, Professor Mike Wilmore, who acknowledged the quality of learning and teaching at UNE, the importance of quality teaching being recognised, and how at UNE we place the student at the centre of everything we do.
The UNE Learning and Teaching Symposium website developed to support the Symposium is now a repository for the Symposium presentations. This is an on-going academic development resource that showcases the outstanding learning and teaching taking place at UNE. The UNE Learning and Teaching Symposium website, with presentations, can be found here
Overall, the 2021 UNE Learning and Teaching Symposium was a great success and has provided a platform for UNE’s next major Learning and Teaching venture, the ASCILITE 2021 conference, which will be held at UNE from Monday 29th November to Thursday 1st December 2021. This major event will be accessible in hybrid mode with both face-to-face and virtual attendance being supported. Information on the ASCILITE 2021 conference can be found here
Events like the Learning and Teaching Symposium do not happen without colleagues being willing to devote their time and energy. So, thank you to all the presenters and the support team for making our Symposium happen. Happily, the Symposium will be back in 2022.