I have been teaching part-time masters students in project management for a number of years now and have always been impressed by the dedication that delegates have to the course and the associated challenges of completing assignments whilst holding down a full time demanding professional role as a project manager. To date however this has been admiration from afar, with no real conception of the reality of life as a part-time student. I have been fortunate in that all my academic studies to date both undergraduate and masters level, have been of the full-time variety, completed at a time of my life before real responsibility in the form of husband and children arrived. Continue reading The challenges of the part-time student
All posts by Fiona Saunders
Long Live the Lecture (at least for international post-graduate taught cohorts) !
There has been much talk recently of the flipped classroom, sometimes referred to as the flipped lecture or the inverted classroom. Flipped classrooms are about replacing the traditional lecture, where students listen attentively (or not) to a lecturer imparting knowledge, to a more interactive, discussion based session at which the teacher is available to help students understand the concepts that the students have been asked to study prior to the lecture. The blogger knewton describes the flipped classroom as a move from the teacher as “Sage on the Stage” to “Guide on the Side.”
Continue reading Long Live the Lecture (at least for international post-graduate taught cohorts) !
My Doctoral Research
Imagine for a moment a safety-critical project – the building of a new nuclear power plant, the safe disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste, the design and commissioning of a new gas turbine aircraft engine. These are all examples of projects that must be delivered predictably and safely. Yet these are complicated, multi-million pound endeavours which span several years and require the skilled efforts of many different professionals working across disparate organisations. The uncertainties inherent in these projects are legion and non-trivial. For example, what state will the radioactive waste that has been securely held in a storage canister really be in when we open it up for the first time in 40 years, or how do we design a submarine nuclear propulsion system that must be operational for 30 years with the bare minimum of maintenance access. The challenge facing individuals involved in these projects is to identify, make sense of, assess and act in the face of these uncertainties in a manner that minimises the impact on the delivery of the project. This is the scope of my PhD research, which I started in 2011 and aim to complete before the end of 2016. My goal is to shed light on how individuals – including but not limited to project managers – identify and make sense of these project uncertainties.
You can read about my research as it evolves under the My Publications tab in this blog
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Promoting collaborating learning with wikis
The assessment for a large taught postgraduate unit was changed from traditional essays to group based wikis with the aim of promoting collaborative learning. This video shows what we did…
Continue reading Promoting collaborating learning with wikis
Part-time working in Academia
A colleague of mine has recently reduced her working week from 5 to 3 days, and has been struggling to contain her work within the new 3 day week. Given that I have been wrestling with the same issue over the last 7 years, we met for lunch last week to swap tips on how to manage reduced hours working in the open-ended and pretty unstructured environment of a UK university. Here are some thoughts for those of you who may be in similar situation or considering a switch to reduced hours working.