Welcome to the November issue of Teaching Matters!

introcropTeaching Matters is the University of Edinburgh’s website for debate about learning and teaching, for sharing ideas and approaches to teaching, and for showcasing our successes, including academic colleagues who are leading the way in delivering brilliant teaching.

Every month we take a theme and explore it through a video highlighting one of our outstanding teachers, and a number of blog contributions over the month. We also add news items as they come in and run an events listing page.

The focus for this month is accreditation of teaching. This month, Teaching Matters will feature posts from academic colleagues who have gained accreditation for their teaching, reflecting on the benefits they have found for their own practice.

The University has a Continuing Professional Development Framework for Learning and Teaching which has been designed to provide all colleagues involved with teaching or supporting learning with coherent, flexible and relevant opportunities to enhance their practice.

The Framework is accredited by the Higher Education Academy (HEA), so completing one of the courses or programmes lets you achieve Fellowship of the HEA. Fellowship of the HEA is nationally recognised as showing commitment to professionalism in teaching and learning in higher education. You can become an Associate Fellow, Fellow, Senior Fellow or Principal Fellow depending on the kinds of experience that you have.

For most colleagues at Edinburgh these options from the Framework will be the most relevant:

Edinburgh Teaching Award: a flexible and light touch route to all levels of Fellowship supported by mentoring, blogging, group meetings and optional writing retreats. (This option does not carry SQCF credits.)

Introduction to Academic Practice: a very popular course based on workshops and online learning aimed primarily at tutors and demonstrators. This leads to Associate Fellowship. (This option does not carry SQCF credits).

Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice: a 60 credit Masters level course leading to Fellowship of the HEA. This programme gets great feedback and has good choice of options so you can find what’s most relevant for your own teaching.

If you are particularly interested in online learning you might want to consider the excellent MSc in Digital Education which has HEA accreditation for Fellow for the first 60 credits. If you are based in medicine then the most relevant and helpful options for you may be the Clinical Educator Programme or PG Cert in Clinical Education.

For more details on all of this see the CPD Framework on the IAD website.

Or you can contact the IAD by email.

We hope that you enjoy this edition of Teaching Matters and encourage you to get involved. Future Teaching Matters themes will include:

  •  Equality, diversity, and inclusion – December 2016
  •  Employability – January 2017
  • Teaching beyond the programme – February 2017

If you have an idea or story related to these themes and you’d like to contribute a blog post, video, or other media let us know.

Let us have your news, let us know when you are organising events on learning and teaching we can publicise, sign up to receive notifications when new blogs are published, and send in your own blogs and comments on any aspect of teaching and learning.

One comment

  1. This is a great blog post, thank you. The accredited MSc in Digital Education sounds fascinating, and increasingly relevant in today’s increasingly digitalised society. And there is so much undiscovered potential in IT for learning and schools. I would be interested in learning more about the material covered in the MSc. A factor that cannot be ignored is that people – adults and children alike – really enjoy using technology. Incorporating these interactive experiences into learning has so much opportunity.

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