CELT Magazine
Exploring the Inclusive Curriculum Elevating Education with AR and VR
Introducing Team Based Learning UEL Teaching Fellowship Scheme 2024 Award Winners
Welcome Message
The CELT team is delighted to welcome you to the sixth issue of our magazine. This edition celebrates the achievements of both academic staff and students over the past academic year, and we look forward to exploring new opportunities in the upcoming year.
Freyja Hudson, Senior Internal Communications Officer, reflects on the EON-XR competition, where students were challenged to propose ways to enhance education using AR and VR. The finalists presented to an audience and a judging panel, and after several impressive presentations, the winners were announced. You can read the full story on page 6.
The UEL Teaching Fellowship Scheme winners were announced during the annual University Development Week. Their successful applications should inspire you to apply in the next round. Read more about this on page 10.
We also highlight a joint project between CELT and OIE, titled ‘Exploring the Inclusive Curriculum at UEL.’ This course offers practical strategies and approaches for designing an inclusive curriculum. More details are available on page 15.
For those new to a teaching role, there’s an opportunity to enroll in the ‘New to Teaching Course.’ New this year, you can gain Advance HE’s Associate Fellowship status upon successful completion of the course. See page 13 for more information.
Explore ‘Team-Based Learning’ opportunities with Dr. Prabha Pathasarathy, and if you’re interested, you can sign up to pilot TBL in your modules with available support and mentorship.
Meet the ‘Disability and Dyslexia Team,’ and don’t miss our regular ‘Let’s Turn the Lens on You’ article on motivation. While you’re motivating yourself, why not get in touch? If you’re working on something related to learning, teaching, or assessment that you’d like the wider UEL community to know about, we’d love to feature it in the magazine.
We hope you enjoy the read. Page 3
Exploring the Inclusive Curriculum at UEL
CELT and OIE have been working on a joint project ‘Exploring the Inclusive Curriculum at UEL’. The course is divided into six sections covering key inclusivity debates, challenges and advancements in higher education, practical strategies and approaches for designing an inclusive curriculum, and the complete resources for the new UEL Inclusive Curriculum Framework (UEL ICF). It also aligns with UEL’s Cross-Cutting priorities of Social Justice. It is intended as the precursory curriculum work to follow-up live in-person development sessions with school course teams.
The self-paced course is available via a SCORM package on Moodle, UEL ICF: Exploring the Inclusive Curriculum at UEL. The course was created in-house as a joint project between CELT and OIE. There are six sections and a course evaluation form. Once the self-paced element has been completed, CELT will follow up with live, in person development sessions to action plan and apply the UEL Inclusive Curriculum Framework (UEL ICF) to course curriculums. The framework is aligned to the Advance HE PSF Framework and the UEL TEAL Framework. By the end of the course, we would expect delegates to:
1. Recognise the motivations for the current trends and drivers for inclusive practice in higher education,
2. Identify and discuss the approaches, principles, strategies and topics than make a curriculum inclusive,
3. Reflect upon and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your own practice in terms of inclusivity,
4. Explore how the four dimensions of inclusive practice interact with the nine TEAL foci in the UEL Inclusive Curriculum Framework (UEL ICF).
5. Set an action plan as a lecturer or module leader to enliven the inclusive practice in your modules.
You can now access Exploring the Inclusive Curriculum at UEL and complete it at your own pace in preparation for the coming academic year.
#4 Let’s Turn the Lens on You
By Gabriella Buttarazzi
Never underestimate the power of self-reflection: Research shows the intentional practice and habit of reflection can separate extraordinary professionals from mediocre ones.
The practice of self-reflection is experiential. It is an analysis of a personal experience or observation. To practice self-reflection, start with a specific topic and be mindful to maintain that focus throughout the practice. Begin to contemplate your answer some questions of current interest relating to that topic. When they start to make some sense, write them down. Review and analyse those responses. Identify key themes and findings, make connections where they present themselves, and write down the insights and new-found knowledge that is helpful for you to learn from.
So we invite you to take a moment of pause, a pen and blank sheet of paper as you too reflect on your uncensored answers to these questions on your relationship with :
What hinders your motivation?
Are these intrinsic/internal hindrances or extrinsic/external ones?
Do the people around you affect your motivation? (Be as specific as possible when thinking about the person/people) If yes, are they affecting you positively or negatively? And in what ways?
What do you currently feel a lack of motivation towards in your professional life? What are the probable or possible reasons for this lack of motivation?
What do you feel specifically motivated to work on career-wise this Spring?
What conditions would you need to sustain that motivation to fruitful ends?
CELT acknowledges Neurodiversity and appreciate this task may hold challenges for those that are neurodivergent.
“Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one’s actions so as to engage in a process of continuous learning.” ~ Donald Schön
EON-XR competition winners: Elevating education with AR and VR
By Freyja Hudson Senior Internal Communications Officer
Congratulations to Harvey Pangilinan, the overall winner of our EON-XR student competition!
Harvey’s innovative idea on enhancing student mental health support using augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) stood out among over 100 submissions from students across all Schools.
The winning idea
Harvey, a BEng Hons Biomedical Engineering student, impressed the judges with his proposal on utilising AR and VR to support student mental health. His vision highlighted the potential of these technologies to create immersive, supportive environments for mental well-being.
EON-XR and our partnership
Our collaboration with EON Reality, a leader in AR and VR solutions for education and industry, grants us access to their state-of-the-art EON-XR software. This platform leverages AR and VR to conduct remote learning and training in a highly interactive and immersive way.
The competition journey
Students were tasked with crafting proposals on how to elevate various aspects of education at UEL using EON-XR. You can see the competition categories in the table below along with the finalists, who had the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of esteemed judges at our finals event on 29 May 2024.
The judges then had the difficult task of selecting an overall winner. This competition was a fantastic chance for students to showcase their creativity and for colleagues to support their hard work and enthusiasm.
Exciting prizes
The competition featured thrilling prizes. Each category winner received a personalised engraved iPad, while Harvey, the overall winner, also took home £1,000 in vouchers and a Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset.
WINNER Harvey Harvey Pangilinan with his prizes!
Discover more
See below for more details on Harvey’s winning idea and other innovative proposals from our talented finalists. Join us in celebrating the ingenuity and dedication of our students as they explore the future of education with AR and VR!
Name of finalist: Harvey Pangilinan (WINNER)
Category: Supporting student wellbeing
Proposal: Supporting counselling by using AR and VR to help students better manage their mental health.
Name of finalist: Alyssa Marie Carlos
Category: Boosting employability
Proposal: Using AR and VR recreations of an employee’s first day ‘in the office’ to improve confidence and help familiarise new starters with both their environment and colleagues.
Name of finalist: Cameron Bray
Category: Engaging with community engagement or outreach
Proposal: Building a universally accessible online forum using virtual 3D spaces and avatars for information-sharing and decision-making to promote and foster community engagement.
Name of finalist: Kate Moore
Category: Enhancing teaching on a module in my course or student learning across a course Proposal: Recreating the student journey with virtual classrooms, from kindergarten to university, overlaid with learning and teaching theory materials to educate our future educators.
Name of finalist: Nidharshanen Selliah
Category: Promoting enterprise, entrepreneurship and sustainability
Proposal: Enhancing AR and VR retail by employing haptics to allow customers to have an additional sense and feel of the products being sold. This could enable more confident purchase decision-making.
Name of finalist: Samantha Reid
Category: Enriching student research projects
Proposal: Creating a tailored and adaptive library experience for research students, whereby both content and materials are presented in AR in the book stacks based upon the subject being researched and the personal preferences of the researcher, with the help of AI.
From left to right: Ian Wells (Interim DEE of Psychology), Chloe Jarman (Siemens, UEL Employee Partner), Kate Moore (finalist), Samantha Reid (finalist), Harvey Pangilinan (overall WINNER), Cameron Bray (finalist), Nidharshanen Selliah (finalist), Alyssa Marie Carlos (finalist), Professor Hassan Abdalla (Provost), Jamie Meecham (Centre for AR & VR Manager)
Watch the highlights here
Introducing … the Disability & Dyslexia Team (DDT)
The number of UEL students declaring a disability has increased over the years, and so has the number of students with multiple conditions and complex needs. In response to this, the Disability and Dyslexia Team (DDT) has expanded to ensure that we continue to provide a high-quality service to UEL students. This is also an opportunity to increase our engagement with other departments and advise on disability related matters. This includes our growing work with Schools, so we can jointly address issues to improve retention, progression and the student experience. As well as attending School 360 meetings, with other support services, we have assigned Disability and Dyslexia Advisors to each School (see below).
Feel free to invite us along to your School/Departmental/Course meetings, so we can tell you about our services and how we support students. Please note: if you have concerns about an individual student, please email our general inbox: ddac@uel.ac.uk, this is the quickest way to get a response as your query will be dealt with by our daily Duty Adviser.
In the meantime, for all information related to the services we offer, please visit our SharePoint pages: Disability & Dyslexia Team (sharepoint.com)
Nigel Meeson
Head of Disability, Accessibility and InclusionEducom
Ayesha D’Costa
Senior Disability & Dyslexia Advisor - ACE
Cerys Davies
Disability & Dyslexia Advisor –Digital Accessibility
Inesa Kharchenko
Disability & Dyslexia AdvisorRDBSL
Clive Cort
Disability & Dyslexia Team Manager - HSB
Anu Doraisamy
Disability & Dyslexia Advisor - Mental Health
Rebecca Lewis
Disability & Dyslexia AdvisorPsychology
Martin Walsh
Disability & Dyslexia AdvisorACI
David McNulty
Disability & Dyslexia AdvisorRDBSL
Reepa Rahman
Disability & Dyslexia Team Assistant
Disability & Dyslexia AdvisorPsychology
Katie White
UEL Teaching Fellowship Scheme 2024 winners
The UEL Teaching Fellowship Scheme is a CELT initiative that was reinstated in the academic year 21/22 to recognise, reward and celebrate excellence in learning and teaching at the University. It is also a chance to share effective, innovative practices within the institution and across the sector, whilst serving as a pipeline for NTFS / CATE nominations.
Every year, up to five winners are chosen. There are four categories within the Scheme:
Teaching and Learning Excellence (Main category) 2 awards
Teaching and Learning Excellence (Early Careers staff) 1 award
Teaching and Learning Excellence (Professional Services staff) 1 award Team Award 1 award
We are very pleased to announce this year’s award winners:
Teaching and Learning Excellence – 2 individual awards:
Dr Luana Parisi
Lecturer in Construction Engineering and Management, Programme Leader BSc Construction Management, Academic Link Tutor UNICAF, School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering
Luana’s application included an impressive array of projects to enhance the student experience, including, for example, her work on curriculum design in the BSc Construction Management course, securing CIOB (the Chartered Institute of Building) accreditation and outstanding NSS results for her course (BSc Construction achieved the 1st spot out of 41 programs across the entire UK). Another remarkable achievement was her students winning the Engineering for People Design Challenge, promoted by Engineers without Borders, after being put through to the national competition against 48 other institutions. Luana is also committed to supporting and influencing her colleagues through the Coffee and Research Beans mentorship initiative.
Carla Trim-Vamben
Co-Director of Education and Experience, Co-Head of Department and senior Lecturer for (BA) Hons Dance: Urban Practice, School of Arts and Creative Industries.
Carla’s application was a truly well-structured narrative with substantial use of evidence to support the points being made. There was a strong focus on decolonising the curriculum and reducing the award gap in the BA Dance: Urban Practice course. Her initiatives have had a great impact on her course - since 2018 the average has been a -1.6% awarding gap. Carla has also provided ample evidence of collaborative curriculum design to establish cross-module connections to foster a unified course identity. Dance at UEL significantly exceeded the sector benchmark for overall satisfaction in the National Student Survey (NSS) 2022, with consistent placement in the top 4 of London since 2015. Her work leading the evaluation and consultation for the Arts Council England (ACE) funded initiative, We Move, was a great example of reach and impact within UEL and beyond.
Teaching and Learning Excellence – Early Career Staff:
Mo Jafar
Senior Lecturer in Sport, PE & Development, School of Health, Sport and Bioscience
Mo’s application showed lots of examples of great practice. These included the redesign of a Sports Level 5 module using Sport Education as a pedagogical model and several instances of collaborating with externals to keep the content current, motivate students and facilitate valuable industry insights, such as a collaboration with a national coach developer and a handball masterclass delivered by two England Handball coaches. Mo also showed ample evidence of reach through the creation of content for PE Scholar, a national PE organisation that develops CPD resources for the profession, as well as the dissemination of Lesson Study in his department and across the institution.
Aisha Labefo-Audu
Partnerships Manager, Careers and Student Enterprise
Aisha’s application demonstrated impact and engagement beyond her immediate professional role. Examples of good practice included her work on the Diversity of Thought Programme and the Funded Internship Scheme. The Diversity of Thought Programme, launched in 2020, aims at bridging the gap between students and high-profile organisations and it is an initiative to empower students to reach their potential and secure positions with leading companies. Student and employer partner feedback on this project was excellent. The Funded Internship Scheme has also provided underrepresented groups with access to valuable internship opportunities.
Team Award
Quality Assurance and Enhancement Team (QAE)
Helen Fitch, Philip Brimson, Louis Clark, Dominique Jethwa, Vikki Manning, Oliver Lane, Emily Latham
QAE’s application clearly showed how they developed as a true collaborative team that is guided by a clear set of objectives and principles and works cohesively to achieve their goals. Through their team development programme, QAE Officer Buddy System, job shadowing and regular team meetings, they fostered a team culture of collaboration. They provided ample evidence of influencing colleagues and working with different stakeholders, such as the Academic Partnerships Office, DEEs, HR, OIE, as well as a genuine effort to incorporate the student voice throughout. Their approaches to Student Voice were presented at the Student Voices in Higher Education Conference in 2023 and, in conjunction with the University of Sussex, they set up the Student Voice Practitioners Group.
Left to right: Emily Latham, Louis Clark, Dr. Helen Fitch, Aisha Labefo-Audu, Dr. Luana Parisi and Carla Trim-Vamben, all collecting their awards
New to Teaching Course
Are you new to teaching in Higher Education?
Are you unsure how to plan and structure your sessions?
Do you wonder what else you could do to make your sessions more interesting?
Come to this course to enhance your knowledge of key aspects of active, inclusive and studentcentred teaching. We will cover different learning theories, active learning, digital pedagogies, assessment and feedback and more!
The New to Teaching course aims to combine education theory with practice to enable you to develop your teaching skills. It provides an introduction to developing effective learning experiences and it promotes self-reflection as a powerful tool to enhance one’s teaching practice.
Successful completion of the course will lead to Advance HE's Associate Fellowship status (AFHEA).
Teaching will be a mix of self-paced units on Moodle (to be completed before the relevant live session) and live workshops on campus (DOCKLANDS CAMPUS)
Live workshops will run on Thursdays 10:00 - 13:00 from October 3rd until December 19th, 2024.
To register, please click here
If you have any questions, please contact Dr Melisa Rinaldi
Introducing Team-Based Learning
By Dr Prabha Parthasarathy (Senior Lecturer, HSB) and Sima Heer (Academic Developer, CELT)
Team-Based Learning (TBL) is a transformative approach to delivering teaching and learning in your classroom. TBL makes learning more engaging and fun through a series of student-centric activities.
Dr. Prabha Parthasarathy, a Senior lecturer in HSB uses TBL in her modules. This is how it works: Students are assigned their teams and they work their way through a sequence of activities consisting of readiness assurance tests and application exercises. Through intra and intergroup conversations facilitated by her, students develop a deeper understanding of key concepts and learn to apply them to real-world decisionmaking scenarios.
Prabha has received positive feedback from students and noted that such sessions foster student’s sense of belonging, alongside creating a more responsive learning environment and reducing the power gap between staff and students.
To know more, you can dip into this recent CELT seminar on TBL.
If you are keen to pilot TBL in your module or course, please fill out this short form to register your interest. We can support you by offering training workshops, resources or through mentorship.
Events
Academic colleagues, please ensure that you complete the mandatory ‘Annual Academic Update 2024’ self-paced course, key updates are provided by Professionals Services.
This short course was available during the June Development Week 2024 and to be released annually thereafter. This covers changes to policies, processes, legislation, strategies, that academics need to be aware of before the beginning of the next academic session.
The course includes short video presentations along with a handy downloadable PDF that contains all links. Contributions for this update include Library, Archive and Learning Services (LALS), The Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), Academic Registry, and Quality Assurance and Excellence (QAE). It’s been designed to take no longer than 45 minutes to complete, and it can be easily achieved while enjoying a coffee or any beverage of your liking.
Access the course here - ‘Annual Academic Update
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