Engaging a large cohort of students with teaching content is a difficult task for any educator working in higher education. When students are not receiving feedback about their participation efforts, this can lead to decreased engagement. Polling activities, such as hands up responses, can be used to address this but students cannot respond…

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a shift to online teaching, which has dramatically affected all facets of the student experience. In this practice report, we reflect on the synchronous delivery of a popular final-year module "Face Perception" in a United Kingdom (UK) psychology undergraduate degree. In the module, students learned via…

In industrial design education, the curriculum should be structured to facilitate and advance student learning. The purpose of this work is to enhance the education by introducing mobile lectures and imbedded innovative approach to Bournemouth University (BU) Education, which will be employed by the lecturer in the years to come.

This article discusses the authors' experiences of the transition from trainee to trainer on a psychotherapeutic training programme, and some of the challenges involved. Using the framework offered by Rizq (2009), the article examines the many parallel processes implicit in the roles of trainee, trainer and therapist. We explore these using…

Computer-aided assessment (CAA) has been used at a university with one of the largest mathematics and engineering undergraduate cohorts in the UK for more than ten years. Lecturers teaching mathematics to first year students were asked about their current use of CAA in a questionnaire and in interviews. This article presents the issues that these…

Mathematics is full of surprises and beauty. In this article, the author discusses three favourite topics that he finds both amazing and amusing: (1) the problem of the possibility of subdividing a rectangle into a number of different squares; (2) the arrangement formed when several soap bubbles meet; and (3) circles and spheres.

This article concerns itself with how academic identities may come to be formed. Taking a longitudinal approach, stories of the experiences of probationary lecturers have been gathered and analysed, to outline an emergent typology of academic socialisation. Whilst the stories are unique to individuals, and the broader context of their experience…

This article has four aims. The first is to characterize the key features of speech-act theory, and, in particular, to show that there is a genuine distinction between the sound uttered when someone is speaking (locution), the effect the speech has (perlocution) and the very "act" of speaking (the illocution). Secondly, it aims to…

"Independent" lecture agencies are a neglected element in the history of education. Between 1918 and 1939, the Selborne Lecture Bureau was a significant national provider of adult education in Britain, both in its own right and as a supplier of lecture(r)s to Women's Institutes and other bodies, and it pioneered the use of films in…

Many lecturers find that teaching and research compete for their time. However, teaching and research can be linked closely together, and there are many ways of linking the two. This article will consider how research can be incorporated into teaching through a case study in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University (in the United Kingdom), where…

Since their inception, North American universities have struggled with balancing their dual mandates of research and teaching. Over the past twenty years or so these activities have become increasingly polarized, with research activity (particularly that which brings in additional money) being given an ever more privileged and prestigious…

The Personalised System of Instruction is a form of mastery learning which, though it has been proven to be educationally effective, has never seriously challenged the dominant lecture-tutorial teaching method in higher education and has largely fallen into disuse. An information and communications technology assisted version of the Personalised…

Technology is increasingly used to aid the teaching of statistics. Personal Response Systems (PRS) involve equipping students with a handset allowing them to send responses to questions put to them by a lecturer. PRS allows lectures to be more interactive and can help reinforce material. It can also allow the lecturer to monitor students'…

As university lecturers select and sequence materials for their teaching, a linear structure emerges by default. Such a structure is made explicit within PowerPoint presentations and may even be amplified as PowerPoint invites the lecturer to reduce content to a bulleted format. Such linear sequences have been related to passive, surface…

This article considers the value of collaborative forms of educational action research in higher education and the difficulties involved in implementing such forms of research. It is argued that educational action research represents an opportunity for improving teaching and learning and developing the knowledge and skills of those participating…