Greetings to everyone and all best wishes for a restful winter break.

2013 is a really important year for SEDA and we look forward to celebrating with our members.

Do HE teacher development programmes have an impact on student learning?

Last wednesday I attended a HE Academy/Guardian Newspaper debate representing my VC. It will feed into a Guardian article to be published on 20th November. It raised some interesting questions, especially for those of us involved in these programmes. It was a good debate too mainly because the wide range of people involved held very different ,sometimes challenging, views on the value of such programmes and learning and teaching enhancement in general.It included university managers, students, educational developers and lecturers.

The debate was prompted by research commisioned by the HEA which pointed to the limited evidence of impact on student learning directly. You can see this here and hence the call for more research in this area.

Please look out for the article and use the online discussion forum to respond on 20th November.

In the meantime here are some of the views/questions which really got me thinking during the debate and which I think the SEDA community might also like to ponder:

1. Is it even possible  to find causal links between our teacher development programmes or even T&L initiatives and learning and teaching units  and the student learning experience? How do you separate the programme or the initiative and the other factors which create the learning experience? If it is, when might those links emerge? I began to think about Mentkowski's (2000) Learning that Lasts  work for example that tracked students 5 years after leaving.
2. If we can't measure impact then are we making ourselves vulnerable in the current political/economic climate? The debate included people who thought that some Pg certs were of low quality, should be closed down, mired in narrow social science paradigms, too academic (because people need teaching skills not scholarship), valued in a theraputic, self serving discourse (like homeopathy) rather than for  impact on student learning. Comments included - 'Often it's one man and a dog running these courses designed 'on  a wing and a prayer'
3. Is it true that our scholarship has focused too much on the impacts on the participants and our roles rather than impact on student learning?
4. Do we need programmes or merely spaces for academics to come together and do scholarship of L&T through action research  and hone skills and ideas?
5. What might the impacts on student learning look like and how might we measure them? Should we not start with figuring out what a good student experience should be like and the work backwards to the educational development required?
6. How do we encourage a culture where Vice Chancellor's push L+T and value it?
7. How much do we need to work with students to understand the evaluation of their HE learning experiences. UK National Students Survey is too narrow and suggests its about satisfaction not engagement / learning.
8. What provision might be shared across the sector? Not all HE providers are  in a position to offer PG certs or apply UKPSF - should we be looking at shared services?
9. Has there been too much focus on individuals and not enough on programmes?
10. HEA don't have the monopoly on UKPSF - what might be the implications in the UK?
11. Should the HEA or another body to offer a national programme?

Preparing for SEDA Executive Meeting 26 th 0ct

Wow looking at the agenda for Friday makes you realise how much is happening in SEDA at the moment:

• Preparations for SEDA's 20 th birthday continue afoot. Birthday lecture in January and Gala dinner after spring conference almost ready. lots of other things too. Look out for news soon.
• SEDA's PDF programmes in Learning and Teaching and Supporting Learning have been aligned to UKPSF to help colleagues who want to use them for CPD schemes. Thank you to Sally Brown for all her help and to the small advisory group.
• SEDA has now got agreement from HESA that SEDA programmes can be counted as teaching qualifications
• SEDA is making excellent progress with its JISC Digital literacies  project and SEDA now has a DL SIG which has its own blog http://sedasig.wordpress.com/
• SEDA is also making progress on the project for the HEA looking at use of UKPSF
• We have had an excellent response to call for papers for the November conference with David Willetts MP as one of the speakers and calls are out for next spring's conference in Leeds which will be followed by the SEDA@20 Gala Dinnerhttp://www.seda.ac.uk/index.php?p=4_1&t=1

Looking forward to seeing lots of people at the SEDA November conference at Aston Business School 

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_

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