News Since May AGM - and apologies

Apologies for lack of posts over last few months. I think I have experienced the typical lull in blog enthusiasm after a few months and it was beginning to feel onerous when my institutional role was so busy. This is one of the hazards of having a SEDA co-chair who can offer an authentic voice from the from line of UK educational development - the front line is often so taxing that SEDA gets rather squeezed out.

So here is some selected news since the May Annual General Meeting:

1. The SEDA 2010-11 Annual report was presented at the AGM at the Chester Conference. The report indicated that despite a challenging year, SEDA's activities remained impressive and there was lots of evidence of good levels of engagement. membership income was robust and conferences had been very well attended. The report is available on the SEDA website http://www.seda.ac.uk/
2. A number of colleagues stood for positions on the SEDA executive. SEDA welcomes new executive members, a new vice chair Pam Parker City University and Stephen Bostock from Keele and Glyndwr Universities as co-chair. Further iformation is available on the website http://www.seda.ac.uk/
3. Roz Grimmitt is back from Argentina and is now heading up the SEDA office again.We are very pleased to have her back. Thanks to Silvia Sovic who covered while Roz was away and Ann Aitkin for the extra hours put in. SEDA continues to monitor admin processes to ensure efficiencies.
4. SEDA Summer School starts today. This year it has some sponsored places from JISC as part of the  Digital Literacies and Professional Associations project. SEDA also has a new Digital Literacies SIG linked to the project.
5. SEDA has run 3 very popular workshops to help members prepare for developing schemes mapped to the new UKPSF. Presentations can be found here
6. The November Developing the Developers conference will take place in  Aston Business School. David Willetts will be one of the keynote speakers and the theme is excellence on teaching in HE. More info here http://www.seda.ac.uk/?p=14_2&e=427
7. A good number of SEDA members are heading to Bangkok next week for the conference of the International Consortium of Educational Development and the ICED council. It will be very interesting to benchmark ourselves against other associations workdwide.
8. SEDA Twitter now has over 1000 followers @Seda_UK_

SEDA 20th Birthday celebration are being planned for 2013 with a Gala dinner, birthday awards and special publications and events.Check out the website for info...

Seasons Greeting from SEDA co-chair

Thank you to everybody who has been involved in whatever way with making 2011 such a good year for SEDA. Highlights have included:

• Sucessfully working with JISC as first professional body to receive funding from them  to co-ordinate the Embedding IT project . This has now led to a number of professional bodies, including SEDA receiving funding as part of the DIGITAL LITERACIES project.
• Two excellent conferences - one in Chester and one in Aston Business School which broke all records for attendance and twitter chat
• Invitations to contribute to the Govt HE White Paper on enhancing teaching
• Re-design of the SEDA Fellowship Programme and relaunch as the national recognition route for educational developers
• Contributing to the consultation on the UKPSF
• Making stronger links with NUS, UUK, ALDinHE, JORUM, HEDG and QAA
• Running first joint event with HE Academy
• The growth in numbers of universities and colleges wanting to develop SEDA Professional Development Programmes
• Welcoming new members onto SEDA executive
• Appointing Shan Wareing as Fellowships co-ordinator and  David Baume as Digital Literacies Project Officer
• Creating a new committee, chaired by Tony Brand to look after membership and entrepeneurial activity
• a SEDA JISC list which continues to buzz at the heart of educational development with discussion, debate and the collective wisdom on which SEDA thrives

I am sorry if I have missed anything or anybody. Thank you once again and all best wishes for 2012.

Julie Hall
Director of Leanring and Teaching Enhancement
University of Roehampton
London

SEDA's sucessful bid to the JISC Digital Literacies Project

SEDA has been successful in its proposal to support JISC Developing Digital Literacies Project with 11 other sector bodies and professional associations (ALDinHE, ALT, AUA, SCASP, LSIS, ODHE, SDF, HEDG, SCONUL, UCISA and Vitae). The 10k project will involve SEDA in disseminating and testing some of the utcomes from institutional Digital Literacies Projects relating to staff and educational development. One particular project, that at the Institute of Education actually has SEDA as a partner from the beginning and will look at developing digital literacy as a graduate attribute

SEDA is currently advertising for a development officer to support this work by embedding it into SEDA's one day events, conferences, publications professional development framework and courses. Anyone interested should contact office@seda.ac.uk

The sucess of SEDA's bid, builds upon a previous project last year with JISC - the first to involve a professional body in this way to aid dissemination and the embedding of new approaches.

The final report is available at:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/staffroles/embedit.aspx

Reflections on SEDA Conference 17th and 18th November

Had a great 2 days at SEDA conference. A key theme throughout was how we might ensure that technology leads to the real enhancement of pedagogic practice in HE. A fantastic range of people meant that technologists, academics and educational developers came together to debate how we might move this agenda forward and share ideas and experiences of doing so. At the same time people came across tools for educational development that they had perhaps not considered before. A well received workshop by Sue Beckingham and David Walker for example looked at how one might build professional  networks using social media . An extremely interesting symposium shared some of the open educational resources colleagues have been developing for Pg certs in Tearning and Teaching in HE.

The conference finished with a virtual and interactive keynote from Professor Susanne Quinsee which pulled together many of the strands which had developed over the 2 days. I particularly liked the way we were encouraged to consider the reasons for the gaps between available technology and practice in HE.

As you might expect Twitter was used extensively throughout the conference and Sue Beckinham has kindly created a wonderful story line sharing tweets which referred to particular parts of the conference

http://storify.com/suebecks/16th-annual-seda-conference-2011  Thanks Sue.

The hashtag for the conference was #sedaconf16. You can follow seda on twitter @seda_uk_

.

Please post comments below and we'd also be grateful if you would please complete the evaluation survey.

http://www2.napier.ac.uk/UltimateSurvey/Surveys/TakeSurvey.aspx?surveyid=1758

Thank you

SEDA Conference Using Technologyto Enhance Learning

Over the next two days Iwill report on the SEDA Conference at Aston University Business School UK.The programme looks really exciting and the conference venue is full. With this theme expect lots of twitter activity.Follow on twitter @seda_uk_   #sedaconf16

SEDA - summer news

Today, on behalf of SEDA Exec I have submitted a response to the BIS White Paper, based on the comments we received. In it we welcomed the focus on teaching excellence, warned about competition and suggested that the data on those meeting UKPSF at all levels could be helpful for students in choosing universities. We also welcomed the focus on rewarding teaching and promotion routes which reflect this.Thank you to everyone who contributed.

Over the summer, SEDA exec members held a meeting with William Locke, Head of Learning and Teaching at HEFCE. A point for discussion was the plan to open up degree awarding powers to bodies who wouldn't necessarily deliver the higher education programmes themselves. We discussed the kind of evidence that might be required by such bodies to indicate quality assurance and enhancement.

If you use Twitter, you may be interested in tweets from SEDA http://twitter.com/#!/Seda_UK_

SEDA is now taking registrations for its new Supporting and Leading Educational Change (Professional Qualification Course).

This is a 12 week online course designed to accredit your work in supporting and leading educational change. Successful completion confers elibility for Fellowship of SEDA.

For further details and a registration form, see www.seda.ac.uk

Any ideas for SEDA response to English White Paper?

http://c561635.r35.cf2.rackcdn.com/11-944-WP-students-at-heart.pdf

The consultation on the White Paper closes on the 2^nd September. SEDA exec would like to formulate a SEDA response and would welcome your views, particularly on the following which stem from Chapter 2:

·         The perceived link between information for prospective students and enhancing teaching excellence

·         Concerns about variations of student workload across subjects and institutions

·         Promotion routes which recognise teaching

·         Incentives for universities to focus on teaching

·         The publication of information for prospective and existing students about the teaching qualifications, fellowships and expertise of their teaching staff at all levels.

And from chapter 3 your views on this paragraph:

We want to ensure that English universities are at the forefront of

improvements in formal and informal feedback from students on their learning

experience. We believe that allowing students and lecturers within a university

to see this feedback at individual module level will help students to choose the

best course for them and drive an improvement in the quality of teaching.

So we expect all universities to publish summary reports of their student

evaluation surveys on their websites by 2013/14. Before this, we will work

with the Higher Education Council for England (HEFCE), the National Union of

Students (NUS) and others, to agree the information and format that will be

most helpful to students.

Any responses received by 1^st September will feed into the SEDA response.

Kind regards

Julie Hall

SEDA co-chair