Goldsmiths Learning Enhancement Fellowships 2009-2010

Enhancing student learning through student feedback

Goldsmiths routinely collects student feedback and uses it to improve the student learning experience. These fellowship projects have all been developed in response to student feedback. Click on the title to see project findings.

Anthropology: Mark Lamont

Developing students academic literacy

This project approaches students’ academic literacy as a disciplinary practice rather than just a technical skill. It will produce a resource titled Reading Ethnography/Writing Anthropology, which delivers a range of case studies and introduces different approaches to them. Students will be able to add their own questions and discussions, from which tutors can identify common problems with academic literacy.

Computing: Gareth Lewis and Mark d’Inverno

Remote delivery of a programme with a partner institution in Malta

This project will develop learning strategies to promote the ‘deep knowledge’ students can acquire over the course of a programme.

Computing: Mick Grierson

iPhone and iPad programming for creatives: developing a Goldsmiths iOS development course for all undergraduate and masters students

Students on the Creative Computing programme will be assisted in developing contemporary media applications by libraries of computer programmes. Programming for media is a thriving subject which, as this project will demonstrate, benefits from innovative teaching approaches.

Cultural and Community Studies: John Hutnyk

Commodity, Relation and Value: Supervision in the teaching factory

Working with information from the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey, this project will ensure that supervisors are knowledgeable, available and give good guidance, and will determine what feedback students find most helpful.

Educational Studies and Design: Emma Snowden, Maggie Pitfield, Jim Anderson and Jenny Bain

Collaboratively creating an innovative curriculum using learn.gold

New e-learning elements will be created for the Flexible PGCE, including self-assessment tools for students. General Professional Studies ‘subject tasks’, a key part of the programme, will be transferred to an online format. The project will create good quality learning tasks that foster a culture of peer supported learning.

Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship: Sian Prime

Creating a formal structure for peer learning

This will be used to develop the participants’ understanding of their personal values and business ethics. The project is focussed on enquiry-based education, and will be one strand in the work ICCE is undertaking with other departments to develop entrepreneurial graduates.

Centre for English Language and Academic Writing: Timothy Chapman

Essay-writing resources: adding disciplinary specificity

This project will increase the depth and realism of examples by using actual pieces of student writing. This will particularly assist departments which attract many international and non-traditional students.

Media and Communications: Joanna Zylinska

Engaging students: interactivity, feedback and group work

Responding to the results of the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey, this project particularly aims to make groupwork a productive space for international students in which they can work through differences in educational systems, cultures and languages.

Psychology: Alice Jones

Communicating complex concepts through video

Students find some concepts in Psychology difficult to learn using conventional verbal instruction. This project will create four to six short films on key concepts, showing their relevance to students’ lives and usefully contextualising them.