Session by: Professor Peter Khan and Dr Mark Carrigan

Wednesday, 7 May 2025, 1pm - 2.45pm 

The development of digital tools that allow users to create text, images, videos and so on means significant disruption for teaching, learning and assessment in universities. After a brief introduction, this session will provide an opportunity for participants to hear from various colleagues within SEED about ways that they have addressed the use of generative AI in their own courses, including from colleagues involved in the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education, and beyond. The session will conclude with a short plenary discussion about potential ways forward for participants in their own practice.

Session by: Dr Laura Winter and Dr Louisa Dawes

Wednesday, 25 June 2025 10.30am -12pm

This workshop aims to explore inclusive assessment practices within The University of Manchester, particularly within SEED. We will begin by discussing the importance of incorporating inclusion from the outset of assessment design, reducing the need for individual adjustments. Participants will engage in discussions to define inclusive assessment and examine current data highlighting inequities in student participation and outcomes. Through examples of inclusive assessment implemented in SEED, we aim to inspire effective practices. We will be introducing a framework to facilitate reflection on inclusive assessment, drawing insights from successful initiatives in other areas of the Faculty. A Q&A session will conclude the workshop.

Session by: Dr. Jenna Mittlemeier

Thursday, 5 October 2023, 10.15am - 12pm

Practices with international students tend to focus on a deficit framing of what international students lack. This workshop, led by Dr. Jenna Mittlemeier, encourages discussions around how support structures can be reconsidered to purposefully avoid this framing, considering instead how internationalisation efforts might be developed through a social justice orientation.

Participants will have an opportunity to reflect on existing practices and where they may be (inadvertently) perpetuating stereotypes or assumptions about international students. Suggestions and discussions will also be collaboratively developed to consider both small-scale and large-scale considerations for moving towards a more ethical and transformative future practices.

Research led by Jenna and MIE colleagues with Advance HE might be of interest to attendees.

View the presentation (pdf)

Session by: Dr Sara Jackson, Dr Liz Gregory, Dr Loretta Anthony-Okeke and Louisa Dawes

This session was postponed, with the aim to reschedule for 2024/25.

Feedback and assessment practices in education have a powerful influence on learning. However, in higher education they tend to be implemented as a one-way transmission of diagnostic information via a Turnitin Report outside of the classroom, where teachers provide electronic comments on each student’s paper submitted to Turnitin, and students passively receive the information.

This session examines different ways that formative can be understood and implemented in our day-to-day practice. Participants will be encouraged to talk about and reflect on their ideas and approaches through discussion-based activities.

Session led by: Professor Peter Khan, Helen Perkins, Dr Mandi Banks-Gatenby and Ryan Metcalfe

Wednesday, 7 February 2024 10am - 11.30am

Experience across the sector over the last few years has found that the use of curriculum and learning design frameworks constitutes a key means to improve teaching and learning.

A framework typically involves the specification of a set of features or processes around which to base the design of a course unit or programme. If a desired curriculum characteristic is important, for instance, then using a framework will enable you to see through on what matters.

The session will include an introduction to curriculum and learning design frameworks, lessons from experience of using frameworks with colleagues in design activity, and short inputs from colleagues who have made use of a design framework to support curriculum development (e.g. the CoDesignS Education for Sustainable Development Framework, ABC Learning Design).

The workshop will conclude with small group discussion around possible applications to practice. Participants are each encouraged to bring a course unit outline.

• Watch the event recording
• View the presentation

Session by: Dr Drew Whitworth

Monday, 4 March 2024 12pm –1.45pm

In an era where ChatGPT is already being significantly drawn on for the production of text, how can we be assured that the words students submit for assessment is a product of their own cognitive work?

This Teaching Matters session will discuss how this important question was addressed by a Flexible Learning Pilot that took place in semester 1, based around the use of the Knowledge Forum (KF) online platform and stemming from a link made between MIE and the university's strategic partners in Toronto.

There, Professors Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter have designed KF around the pedagogical principles of Knowledge Building: in which learners are seen as partners in a joint, democratic knowledge-building enterprise and that all ideas are improvable through dialogue and interaction.

KF has a number of built-in analytic tools which can be used to reflect on and assess actual knowledge work engaged in during the course: importantly, these are not tools for top-down surveillance and thus accessible only to the course team, but students are encouraged to use them to reflect on their own learning.

This session will discuss how this worked in practice, and present results from the evaluation of the semester 1 pilot, including the impact on course tutors as well as students.

• Watch the event recording
• View the presentation (pdf)
• Read the Samples of Outputs (word doc)