Student Experience & Academic Standards

Technology-enhanced education

The majority of incoming students have never known a world without the internet or mobile phones. Most use technology non-stop to communicate with friends, find information, etc. So what do you think they expect when they come to university?

The key findings from the eLearning Benchmarking Process can be summarised as follows:

• The need for more emphasis to be placed on the educational dimension of support for technology-enhanced education, and for this to be integrated with support for learning and teaching in general.
• For a greater variety of support to be available for technology-enhanced education and teaching developments to be available in the future.
• Communication strategies need to be developed to ensure that Schools, academics and students understand: the decisions being made in the University regarding technology-enhance education; that decisions, once taken, are properly filtered down to all stakeholders; the developments taking place to improve support for learning & teaching; where to go to receive the support they require to carry out their work.
• Formal guidelines on the design of learning materials to ensure accessibility are to be developed and disseminated (in partnership with the work on the Inclusive Curriculum).
• Further discussion to be held on the possible need for minimum levels of provision of learning materials to all students, to address comments about inconsistencies raised directly by the students.
• The development and dissemination of case studies of good practice of technology-enhanced education to be encouraged to enable academics to incorporate appropriate technologies into their teaching.

The HEFCW-funded Enhancement Project is underway to ensure that these findings are implemented. To enable this to be achieved, a Review of Educational Requirements has been carried out across all Schools. Questions asked include:

• What teaching methods do the Schools currently use? How do they interact with their students?
• How are they currently using technology to support this?
• Are there ways they would like to be using technology?
• What is appropriate for the School?