Debate: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

Debate refers to a discussion in which two or more people advocate opposing positions on a topic or question in an attempt to make an audience (or the other advocates) accept their position. Most people are familiar with participating in informal debates, such as trying to persuade friends why a particular film, song, book, artist, etc. is better than another; however, as…

Critiquing: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

Critiquing is an approach that encourages students to consider their own work by drawing comparisons with the work of their peers. Traditionally, students will submit their work to be critiqued by fellow students and perform their own critique on the work of one or more peers. Through this process the students get feedback on their work from their fellow students and,…

Role-play: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

Role-play is a technique that allows students to explore realistic situations by interacting with other people in a managed way in order to develop experience and trial different strategies in a supported environment. Depending on the intention of the activity, participants might be playing a role similar to their own (or their likely one in the…

Micro-research: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

At its simplest, Micro-research (also known as Inquiry-based Learning) involves getting students to undertake a relatively small research project and report back to their peers. The purpose of the approach is to encourage students to develop a deeper understanding of the material they have been researching while also developing skills that will be useful for other parts of…

Contemporary Approaches to Teaching Panel Q &A response

This is the fourth in a series of articles following our recent event Contemporary Approaches to Teaching –December 10th responding to questions raised by participants. While the panel was able to respond to some of the questions on the day, there wasn’t time to address them all.  To enable all questions to receive a response we will be…

‘Menu’ of teaching approaches and the technologies that can enhance them

The Technology Enhanced Learning team has been working with staff across the university to develop resources to assist academic staff in identifying alternative teaching approaches and technologies suitable to their discipline. One of these resources is a framework or ‘menu’ designed to assist colleagues in identifying different teaching approaches and the technologies that can support…

What is an Electronic Voting System (EVS)?

This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series).  We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. An ‘Electronic Voting System’ (EVS) is a system that allows presenters to ask multiple…

Social media resources for students at Sheffield Hallam

A range of resources to support students in their use of social media is now available. Students can access these four resources at http://go.shu.ac.uk/socialmedia.          The resources include  – How to use social media responsibly – a guide for students – explaining why and how students need to be responsible in their use of…

Event: Pedagogies for collaborative learning at higher levels

Tuesday 16th April 12.00 – 13.30 Cantor 9228 Dr Mira Vogel, Education Developer, elearning Environments, University College London Social learning is an important aspect of the move from didactic to more constructivist approaches to learning. Well-conceived group work promises to contribute to the graduate attributes agenda, bring personal contact and companionship to courses, and provide…