Message from Fiona Smyth, Vice-Dean for Teaching, Learning and Students

19 Sep 2025

Fiona looks forward to Welcome Week, focuses on student voice as a key theme for the coming year, and highlights team teaching as just one innovative approach to pedagogy being piloted across the Faculty.

Dear all,

We’re just a few days away from the start of Welcome Week and I am looking forward to the return of our progressing students  and the arrival of new students as they start out on their university journey. As you read this, I will be on a field course with the new first year Geography students and I am hoping the weather in the Lake District will be drier than it has been here for the last week!

While the summer break offers the chance for us to take some time out from work and recharge our batteries, the energy of students on our campus is always something I look forward to. As ever, this is a time to reset and restart and to ensure that all of our students have the transformative experience that so many of us had while at university.

Thank you to everyone who has been working so hard to make sure that the first semester gets off to a smooth start. This year it has involved even more preparation than usual, with the introduction of Canvas as our new central learning environment marking a significant change for both colleagues and students. Our Faculty eLearning team in particular has been instrumental in helping us get ready with Canvas, and I was pleased to catch up with many of them at last week’s Canvas Confidence event in the Booth Street East building.

It was fantastic that the three days of workshops, drop-ins, discussions and training sessions were so well-attended. I’m very grateful for the commitment and dedication of the team in making the event such a success, and for their wider work on Canvas readiness. I’d like to thank all of those who have been involved but particularly our Humanities colleagues Holly Vipond and Rebecca Oldfield, who organised the event and whose attention to detail made it a particular success.

Of course, our preparations to transition to Canvas have been going on for many months and I’d also like to thank Sarah Dyer (Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning) and Stuart Phillipson (eLearning Manager) for all their work behind the scenes. Thank you too to all our academic colleagues who have been building and publishing course units on the platform ready for the start of teaching from Monday 29 September. There’s still work to be done in some cases but we’re nearly there!

Canvas is just one of several topics covered by the Start of Year Hub on StaffNet, the one-stop shop of essential resources for the first semester. The Hub is regularly updated with the latest information, and also has contact details for escalating an issue if needed. I’d encourage everyone involved in teaching, learning and the student experience to check it out from time to time.

Making our students’ time at Manchester the best it can possibly be is one of our continuing priorities for 2025/26. It was very encouraging to see our NSS results improve earlier this year, but we want to do even better next year! Our NSS action plan last year introduced some necessary changes to improve student teaching and learning, and expanded and enhanced student voice – the ways in which they can give feedback throughout the year. We will be launching our new NSS action plan in the coming weeks and, while the NSS focuses on undergraduate students, we aspire to provide a great experience for all of our students regardless of their level of study.

Listening to our students and acting on their feedback is critical. We want the latest NSS results to be a foundation for a process of continuous improvement, building on what has worked well and making further improvements where needed, in partnership with the Students’ Union and student body as a whole. We want our students to have a sense of belonging and community, and to show them that their opinions, education and wellbeing really matter to us. They should have every opportunity to achieve their full potential and it’s up to all of us, regardless of our specific role, to do what we can to help them on their journey.

Ensuring our taught programmes portfolio is attractive to students, that courses challenge and help them grow, and prepare them for their next stage of life after university are some of the core pillars of the Teaching Sustainability project. As Our Vice-President and Dean Fiona outlined in her welcome message for 2025/26, we’re now in the third and final year of the project, with Schools working on some exciting proposals for programme development.

Innovating and developing how we teach our programmes is an integral part of the project. Over the coming months, we will be launching new guidance to support teaching and enrich the learning experience for students. We need to think more about what students in 2025 want from their degree at a time when knowledge is probably more accessible than ever before. How do we help to curate knowledge and support students to navigate the world around them to become global citizens? It is an exciting challenge, but it will require us to think more creatively about how we teach, what we teach and how we assess.

We will be developing new guidance on team teaching. At its best, team teaching also supports staff development, offering opportunities for academic colleagues to learn from each other’s pedagogical approaches and subject expertise. I’m grateful to everyone who has contributed to shaping this work so far and we’ll be gathering feedback from colleagues and students to refine our approach and share good practice.

I wish you all well as we start the new semester. Let’s ensure that it is a great one for both staff and students alike. Together, we can achieve great things, and I am looking forward to working with you all at an exciting time for both the Faculty and the University.

Best wishes,

Fiona