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Online Learning is a rapidly expanding area in higher education around the world. While it became a necessity during the pandemic, an increasing number of students and short course learners are choosing to study their degrees fully online. Currently UCL offers around 40 postgraduate programmes with a significant distance learning component, just over half of which are delivered fully remotely.

As such, we’re setting up an Online Learning Community of Practice (OLCoP; catchy, we know) to bring together staff who teach and support online programmes, modules, and short courses at UCL.

At this stage, OLCoP is an informal group, and we hope to use regular meetings and the Teams space to:

• Share best practices in online teaching and learning
• Build a communication hub between academic departments, central, and local services
• Identify and recommend professional development opportunities
• Disseminate new and changing information relating to policy, quality assurance, pedagogies, technology, and more
• Ensure that issues relating to equity, diversity, and inclusion in online learning are properly represented
• Gather actionable feedback from staff and students regarding online learning experiences.

If you are interested in joining, please complete this short form. This will also send you an invite to our Teams space.

We will be holding our first meeting of OLCoP on 13th March 2024 at 2:30pm.

This first meeting will take place as a hybrid event and act as an opportunity to get to know other staff teaching and developing online courses.

Those who wish to attend in person can join us at the training suite at the Anna Freud Centre, not too far from King’s Cross station, while those who prefer to join online can do so via Teams. We will have facilitators in both spaces.

You can register to attend using the form linked above.

We hope you can join us!

On 4 July 2013 Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa will be delivering a workshop at UCL on “The Scientifically Substantiated Art of Teaching: Mind, Brain, and Education science”.

This workshop introduces the new academic discipline of Mind Brain, and Education (MBE) science. MBE science is the new and improved brain-based learning known as  the scientifically substantiated art of teaching. It is the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, education, and psychology, and it is a paradigm shift in formal education.

Masters of Education programs around the world are slowly adapting this new model, starting in Harvard in 2001. Popular press information about “brain-based learning,” has been applied indiscreetly and inconsistently to classroom teaching practices for many years.

This workshop seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff (how do we know what is good information and what is just commercial?), and to convince (recruit? invite?) the audience to wear the MBE hat and embrace its shared goals of improving teaching by applying our improved understanding of how the brain learns.

This is a free UCL event, open to the public. Please register here: http://mindbraineduscience.eventbrite.co.uk

Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa

Director of IDEA and a fulltime Professor of Education and Neuropsychology at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Tracey has conducted conferences, workshops and research in 17 countries around the world (Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Australia, Norway, Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Holland, Thailand, and the USA). She has more than 20 years experience in teaching kindergarten through university, over a decade of experience in teacher training and is now primarily focused on educational research.

Tracey will be visiting UCL from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito between 24 June and 7 July. If you would like to speak with Tracey during her visit please contact her via her website: http://www.traceytokuhama.com