LearnHigher

With 16 different partner institutions, Learnhigher is the largest of the 74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) launched in January 2005. Learnhigher’s main objectives are to develop learner resources that can be accessed by students and teaching staff to support student learning in 20 areas including:

• academic writing
• critical thinking
• reading
• PDP
• oral communication
• maths, numeracy and statistics.

Learnhigher is a five-year project running until 2010.

LearnHigher @ NTU

NTU is responsible for the Academic Writing learning area.

Learning from learner support resources
We will be reviewing different examples of module and programme handbooks to try and gain a better understanding of how the design of these impacts upon usability.

Student induction
A number of Learnhigher partners are involved in the induction programmes at their institutions; we are pooling best practice and will be developing guidelines for programme teams.

The project team is based in the Centre for Academic Standards and Quality (CASQ) and consists of:

• Ed Foster – Study Support Coordinator as project leader.
• Rebecca Bell – Learning and Teaching Officer, primarily to research issues of how to support academic writing.

Previous objectives

• December 2006 – Produce a reader outlining current debates in teaching academic writing.
• January 2007 – Produce draft activities to support the development of academic writing.
• February 2007 – Develop academic writing podcasts in areas of critical thinking, introductions, conclusions and plagiarism.
• April 2007 – Review programme handbooks.

History and rationale
Learnhigher was developed collaboratively by a team of learner support specialists who were all members of the Learnhigher jiscmail group (the group is now developing into the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education). Therefore, the initial rational was to develop a resource containing the best examples of learner support materials across the 20 areas of the CETL. More recently, the CETL has started to move away from finding or developing the absolute best practice, largely because learning in higher education is extremely context specific, and just because a writing resource works well in one subject area, or generically, does not necessarily mean that it crosses subjects well. More importantly there are concerns that students are not always able to translate resources across disciplines. At the end of the 5 years, there will be plenty of resources for students to access directly, but it is likely that there will be a greater resource for teaching and support staff. Staff resources are likely to contain generic elements with guidance and suggestions for integrating it into a programme context.

The collaborative nature of the project means that management meetings take place once per term and most communication takes place via mailing lists or a VLE (Fronter). If any colleagues are interested in seeing early developmental ideas before they are placed on the Learnhigher website, please contact Ed Foster for a log in.