As a busy mum of two, I knew that embarking on a part-time PhD was going to test me. I also learned very quickly that I would have to stand on my own two feet as a researcher if I was going to survive my PhD. Fortunately starting my PhD coincided with me joining Twitter (the oft maligned social network) and what a relief it was to discover within the Twittersphere a veritable treasure trove of tips and top advice for every stage of the PhD journey.
Twitter has been a constant companion throughout my PhD journey ( I am in my final year now). Yes, Twitter has regularly distracted me and allowed me to indulge in bouts of procrastination but it has given me so much more than this. Continue reading Twitter as Ersatz PhD Supervisor→
Further to my earlier study of students’ use of rich media materials , I have recently been collaborating with my colleagues Martin Gillie and Andy Gibson on a project which looks at how students use a variety of “rich-media”, such as key-concept videos and tutorial solution videos. Our aim was to investigate how students on first year technical courses used media-rich material and the findings were fascinating. You can read a summarised version here on Martin Gillie’s blog.
Designing assessments for very large classes is often a problematic experience for academic staff, a challenge that is magnified in today’s highly internationalised student environment. In this post, which has been published on the Higher Education Academy website, I discuss the considerations and constraints that must be taken into account when designing assessments that are meaningful, equitable and manageable for both staff and students alike. The post will be of particular interest to the “newbie academic” or those facing the challenges of large class teaching for the first time. You can read the post here
Over the last 7 years I have learned to live with large class sizes. Its not my preferred way of teaching as getting involvement and interaction from serried ranks of learners can be difficult, especially when many come from very different academic cultures and are not native English speakers.
So, I rely heavily on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to support my teaching.
Here is why I do this.
1. I want students to view the face to face lectures as only the start of the learning process and so I would like students to be able to access a range of additional resources to help their learning. For example I have written a traditional module workbook that contains the core unit content for those students that prefer this approach, but have supplemented this with links to case studies, videos and narrated slide presentations to help students who learn differently. Continue reading Using the VLE to support large class postgraduate teaching→
High Reliability Organizations (HROs) claim to be special organizations, which have demonstrated consistently safe performance in operating environments which are simultaneously of high technical complexity, high consequence and high tempo. This paper argues that the literature on high reliability organizing, which emerged through studying day-to-day operations in the nuclear industry, air traffic control and US navy aircraft carriers, might hold important lessons for how the project management community can approach the management of safety-critical projects – projects in which safety is of paramount importance. Such projects might include the safe decommissioning of civil nuclear assets, the building of new nuclear power plants, the development of new oil and gas extraction facilities or the design of new aircraft engines. Much will be demanded of the individuals tasked with delivering these large-scale, complex and highly consequential projects. So what lessons can these individuals take from high reliability theory? And, how might high reliability organizing be realized in these safety-critical projects? Continue reading Towards High Reliability Project Organising→
Professor Fiona Saunders: Project Management Academic and Educator
