The aim of the OER assignment is to provide a high-quality, engaging introduction to topics each student has explored in a previous ‘position paper’ assignment. These topics are aligned with one or more of the course themes, but go beyond them to explore ideas, issues and possibilities relevant to each author’s interests and context.The key to this course is the way it is co-created by its participants. This is important because of the subject matter of the course – digital futures – and how quickly the topics of interest evolve. Creating a sustainable and exciting course of this nature needs a pedagogical approach which is both carefully structured and open in terms of content.

We hoped to learn from the experiences and insights of students as well as offering opportunities for research experience and skill development.

Women and non-white persons are significantly underrepresented in modern philosophy. Research suggests that ‘a major contribution’ to this state of affairs ‘occurs at the undergraduate level’ (Paxton et al. 2012: 955). This is partially due to the fact that the majority of the authors of the texts typically read in class, are white men, and thus the image of a stereotypical philosopher is that of a white male. Consequently, some students are likely to experience stereotype threat and fall victim of implicit bias, which can lead them to dropping out. But typically, any class can be supported by one of several good quality texts, at least some of which have been written by authors from under-represented groups. Including them can help combat the stereotype. However,...

The Festival aims to provide space for staff and students at the University of Edinburgh to play, to experiment, to innovate, to collaborate and, where useful, to fail. We want to provide a space within the University where the emphasis is not on how many seats we fill, how many tickets we sell, how many answers we get right, but rather on truly exploring and pushing boundaries, communicating in radically new ways and leaping into the dark to find out what is there.

Our goals are to help staff and students create innovative, experimental and collaborative ways of learning in a creative and open space, to give people the training and support they need to design and run events, and to celebrate the work of all our event organisers and the discoveries made along the way. By its...

At Edinburgh a Senate Curriculum and Student Progression Committee (CSPC) working group had been looking at resits and supplementary assessments under the leadership of Prof Ian Pirie and issued a ‘Resits and Supplementary Assessment’ document which took effect on August 1st 2014. Among other things, the working group wanted students to be provided with appropriate opportunities to address failure. Schools were also be expected to provide information to students about the guidance available to them when taking additional assessment attempts. We felt that at the IAD we could provide something from the centre in support.

Students need to have the opportunity to address the underlying issues that have contributed to failure so that failure is not repeated over time. These are...

There were several areas of interest: integrating digital literacies training and application into curriculum to support skills for academic outcomes and life-long learning; and, developing students as online, collaborative writers, and building skills for science communication. The project allowed students and staff to explore the affordances of virtual (online) spaces for public engagement. Through publishing collaboratively via Open Education repositories like Wikipedia, students and staff alike can contribute to the University’s knowledge exchange and educational impact agenda.

Additionally, students have access to many search engines, both openly available, and subscription-only and one of the aims of this session was to remind the students of some of these science...

The workshops were intended to:

• Improve the quality and consistency of assessment and feedback
• Highlight the importance of formative assessment
• Draw attention to the broader value of assessment eg in fostering graduate attributes
• Demonstrate the importance of tone as well as content of feedback

Tutors need a lot of information to prepare them for their roles, especially when they are new and come from different cultural contexts. Written guidance helps save time in induction courses, ensure that all tutors have at least a common basis of guidance to get started with, and provides continuity and consistency of practice around these matters for the school. This handbook was one of the first of its kind and has seen many editions and adaptations for other schools and contexts.

A tutorial observation programme was put in place in which a Teaching Fellow observes every tutor in their tutorial teaching. This provides the School with a way to support its tutors by creating an opportunity for the tutors to get specific and individualised feedback, and it helps the Teaching Fellow in developing meaningful relationships with the tutors she supports also in other ways.

The new design was intended to:

• Move from the large lecture format that encouraged passive learning
• Foster critical, independent thinking
• Address authentic, contemporary issues
• Build a sense of belonging to an academic community for both tutors and students
• Draw on the diverse strengths of the multi-disciplinary cohort
• Improve the quality of tutorials by supporting and training doctoral students