Credit: gpointstudio via Adobe Stock

3 October 2024

By Andrea Gauthier, Mina Vasalou, Yang Yang and Team FoodWiser: Sanya Bajaj, Enying Chen, Xinyue Dong, Thi Huyen Mi Nguyen

As the new academic year begins, we reflect on our ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, which is part of IOE’s Education and Technology MA. The aim of DDTM is to support the critical understanding and application of design to educational technologies, with a focus on environmental sustainability. Taking a research-based design approach rooted in creative design practice, during Spring 2024 the student team ‘FoodWiser’ worked with UCL’s caterer, Gather and Gather, to develop a new digital tool for tackling food waste in the UCL halls of residence cafeteria. Food waste isn’t just an annoying problem of dealing with leftovers: each discarded plate of food means wasted resources and unnecessarily inflated greenhouse gases. (more…)

Credit: Annanahabed / Adobe.

24 October 2023

By Charis Bridger Staatz

The year 2023 marked many things: the coronation of the UK’s new King, the coinage of the term “Barbenheimer”, and, perhaps most importantly, the inaugural Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) Year 12 Summer School ‘Harnessing the power of longitudinal research for policy impact’.

Our motivations behind the summer school were twofold: to contribute to widening participation efforts in general across the higher education sector, and to support greater diversity in the social science researcher pipeline. Our experience showed the real potential of programmes that give under-represented school students the opportunity to work directly with university departments on scholarly research, especially when that is over an extended period. Such programmes can make a distinct contribution to showcasing that university is a realistic, and hopefully desirable place for young people to be. They can also be incredibly rewarding for the academics who lead them. (more…)

Credit: Mat Wright for UCL IOE

By Gwyneth Hughes on 15 June 2023

Even the most experienced teachers can struggle to innovate their teaching practice. But how well are we serving these tutors in realising that end point? My research highlighted the value of explicitly scaffolding teachers’ reflection on their practice with theories of teacher development and learners and learning – to support their development as teachers but also keep expectations in check and motivating.

There is an increased expectation that teachers in further and higher education should be trained in teaching, learning and assessment. The most common route to this end is a one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education programme. In general, there is evidence of broad benefit from such programmes, but their contribution to developing the teacher’s conception of teaching/learning such that it supports parallel changes to their actual teaching practice is not so well-established.

(more…)

Credit: Kues1 via Adobe

By Louise Archer on 13 June 2023

This article was originally published on Wonkhe.

What is the secret of social mobility? How and why do some working class young people “go against the grain” to succeed educationally?

Our recent ASPIRES study, based at UCL, found that luck seems to play a key role in creating opportunities for social mobility.

The study draws on insights from over 200 longitudinal interviews conducted with 20 working class young people and 22 of their parents over an 11-year period, from age 10-21. (more…)

Live stream of a talk with BSL interpretation and live captioning.

By Leda Kamenopoulou on 30 May 2023

What is accessibility and why should we think about it?

Accessibility is ensuring physical and digital spaces and products are accessible to people with disabilities. It is also a lot more than that, because by making access easier for disabled people, we make access easier for everyone. Moreover, thinking about accessibility is not optional, it ensures compliance with minimum legal requirements, such as the Equality Act (2010) and the EU Directive on Web Accessibility (2018). As highlighted by the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, accessibility is not just ‘nice to have’ or a ‘tick-box’ exercise, so everyone in an organisation must know and be committed to best practices. (more…)

Credit: PCH Vector / Adobe Stock

By Mary Richardson 27 April 2023

Since its launch in November 2022, the Open AI chatbot, ChatGPT, has been flexing its artificial intelligence and causing moral and practical panics on university campuses across the world. It is unsurprising that universities are concerned about the ramifications of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to create responses to assessments because this:

1. Challenges reliable identification of academic standards; and
2. Initiates detailed reviews of certain types of assessment and their future applicability.

The ability of a faceless, brainless machine to answer questions, write poetry, compose songs (although musician, Nick Cave disagrees) and create visual art, all in a matter of seconds, presents us with some astonishing food for thought. The future of not just how we write, but what we might wish to say, is looking potentially very different as more free LLMs become available and ‘learn’ how to write for us. As someone who researches educational assessment, and who teaches and assesses students, there are many questions that I’m grappling with in relation to this new landscape in education, but here I’m focusing on some that academics might wish to consider with their students:

1. Does the creation and release of LLMs mean students will be more tempted to let an AI model do their academic work for them?
2. What characterizes cheating when using LLMs in assessment?

(more…)

Credit: Cultura Creative / Adobe Stock

By Lynne Rogers and Catherine Sezen on 7 October 2022

More than 100 of the 228 colleges[1] in England provide education for 14-16-year-olds who have found that mainstream school does not meet their needs. The 10,000 plus young people who take up these places are often overlooked, even invisible, in policy terms, falling between school and Further Education (FE).

Research on the combined experience of these students is non-existent. There is no coherent understanding of the curriculum and wider support offered, whether this varies according to local decision-making arrangements and what factors contribute to success or otherwise. What we do know is that the likelihood of many of these young people dropping out and becoming ‘not in (more…)

Progressive educational ideas and practice were highly influential : ‘child-centred’ primary classroom in the 1960s

This blog is the seventh in a series of 12 exploring each decade in IOE’s history in the context of the education and society of the times. Find out more about our 120th anniversary celebrations on our website, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with everything that’s happening.

By Judith Suissa on 28 July 2022

John Dewey argued that philosophy could be understood as “the general theory of education”, and philosophy has always played a central role in teaching and research at IOE. Indeed, IOE is regarded as one of the leading centres for Philosophy of Education in the world.

The decade from 1962-1971 is often regarded as the heyday of British philosophy of education, when what came to be known as ‘the London school’ was crystalised at IOE. This was a period when teacher training courses included lectures and seminars in the ‘foundation disciplines’ of (more…)

© MINES ParisTech / S. Boda 2020 via Creative Commons

By Katia Dowdle on 31 May 2022

‘I own the words I speak more than I own the words that I write’. (student’s sentiment recorded by Joughin)

Higher education students in the UK are predominantly assessed through the medium of writing, with essays being the most common type of assignment. As an academic writing tutor, I have been ‘part of the system’ for several years now, preparing foundation students to understand and appropriately address essay tasks in their university studies.

The mere existence of my job has depended on the long-lived and cherished tradition of essay writing as a means to facilitate learning, diagnose students’ progress and assess understanding. I have always admired the format of academic essay that has an inherent potential to give learners space for expressing new and original ideas and, at the same time, demonstrating their deep understanding of the existing knowledge.

Students have not always shared my enthusiasm though. Moreover, the combination of independent thought and experts’ (more…)

By Lesley Gourlay on 16 February 2022

At the beginning of the pandemic, schools and universities were forced to ‘go online’ at short notice. We often refer to this as ‘virtual learning’, but is that really a good description? We think about the internet as something separate from the ‘real world’ we see in front of us, full of objects and people. The language used to describe it suggests this too – we talk about ‘the cloud’ and ‘the ether’, giving the idea that the online world is a special place, free from the messiness of the material world.

However, the reality of ‘online learning’ is also part of the that world. Computers, laptops and smartphones are objects, and we work with them in ‘real life’ settings. During the pandemic, millions of people had to set up and use digital devices at home for work or study. As we (more…)