Work-based Assessment (WBA): Exploring Critical Issues and Sharing Solutions

This webinar explores what is understood as WBA in the Irish context, focuses on the shared assessment challenges and opportunities across the different contexts and discusses some key practice insights on WBA before inviting participants to highlight critical issues to probe further.

This WBA webinar is the first in a webinar and national symposium series hosted by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in partnership with Quality Qualifications Ireland (QQI),

Webinar: Creating and Sharing Open Educational Resources (OER)

A National Forum webinar “Creating and Sharing OER” took place on 28 May 2020. The webinar explored how to share resources that you have developed as open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate sharing and reuse by others.

Catherine Cronin, Strategic Education Developer at the National Forum, facilitated the webinar and guest speakers Orna Farrell (Dublin City University), Iain MacLaren (National University of Ireland, Galway) and Gearóid O Súilleabháin (Cork Institute of Technology) shared their experiences of creating OER for previous projects funded by the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund. The speakers discussed the use of Creative Commons licences, factors to consider when choosing a licence, and the advantages of openly licensing resources for reuse and remixing by others.

Irish National Digital Experience (INDEx) Survey Report Launch Event

The National Forum, in partnership with higher education institutions across the country, held an online launch of the INDEx Report on 7 May 2020.

In autumn 2019, as part of the Irish National Digital Experience (INDEx) Survey, 25,484 students and 4,445 staff who teach across 34 Irish higher education institutions shared their digital experiences in order to inform and influence the future enhancement of digital teaching and learning in Irish higher education. The tagline for the INDEx Survey, ‘Let’s see where we are so we can build our future together’, reflected the collaborative and focused intentions behind the Survey.

During a time of great change, the INDEx Survey findings provide a unique record of the digital experiences of a diverse range of students and staff in higher education nationally – an important benchmark for our sector.

Embedding Data Use for Supporting Students

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The National Forum’s ‘Embedding Data Use for Supporting Students’ webinar took place on Tuesday 28 April 2020. It is the third in an ongoing National Forum webinar series that looks at effective practices for using data to support students.

This event focused on the challenges and benefits of embedding data use into ongoing institutional practices. The speaker line-up featured Ed Foster, Nottingham Trent University, who discussed the university’s lessons learned in devising and implementing one of the UK’s pioneering learning analytics platforms, the NTU Student Dashboard. Closer to home, Dublin Business School’s Lee Richardson and Sarah Sharkey explored their experience of intervening with students who may be struggling, as identified by their home-grown early alert system. Speaker Jeremy Britton introduced University College Dublin’s Unified Service Model which uses data to ensure student queries and issues are addressed and resolved efficiently and consistently across the campus.

DELTA Award Handbook

This handbook has been produced to guide teams who are interested in applying for the DELTA Award. The handbook explains why the DELTA Award is important for teams and for the sector, it highlights the benefits of achieving a DELTA Award, it outlines the application process associated with the Award and it provides details of where colleagues interested in applying for the Award can find more information.

Student Success: Barriers and Facilitators

This report discusses the views of final year students and recent graduates who attended a TCD led, multi-institutional one-day workshop on what student success means to them, and what they identified as the facilitators of and barriers to achieving that success.
The findings were based on the analysis of four types of inputs for the seminar: written submissions by students on the theme prior to the seminar and student talks, panel discussion and workshop discussions on the day of the seminar.
Student success is a broad concept. It is different for and personal to each student and changes with the student’s journey from initial entry to college through to graduation. In order to have a framework to discuss the concept at the seminar, a thematic analysis was done of the written submissions which students submitted prior to the seminar.