Teaching Fellow Lunches

About

Teaching Fellow Lunches occurr monthly and are open to any member of staff that supports Learning and Teaching. They consist of a 15 minute presentation by a member of staff about a project they're working on or a similar endeavour, with the intention to share current progress and gain feedback from colleagues. This presentation is followed by a 20 minute Q&A session. These events occur in person on South Kensington campus or online via Microsoft Teams. Catered lunch is provided. 

Teaching Fellow Lunches 2023

4 April 2023

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Belonging, Engagement, and Community Project

Luke McCrone and Julianne Viola

Halls of residences are diverse communities which possess enormous potential for learning and a sense of belonging. Findings from the longitudinal mixed methods Belonging, Engagement and Community (BEC) project, which has retrieved interview and survey data from over 700 Imperial students since 2019, suggest an increase in independent and peer-to-peer learning taking place in halls. With the increase in hybrid learning accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, students identified halls as important learning spaces in which they can seek support from Wardens, which has potential to supplement formal, timetabled learning.  

Halls deserve further attention as pedagogic culture and philosophy shift from viewing learning as predominantly happening in traditional 'teaching spaces.' How might we use the research evidence to help Teaching Fellows and Wardens to learn from one another to support students’ learning in a variety of learning spaces across Imperial?   

24 January 2023

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ViRSE

Dr Mark Sutton

Virtual Reality is an exciting and powerful tool for communicating three dimensional concepts, data and objects. It has been shown to deliver educational benefits in terms of enhancing engagement, retention and comprehension. The technical difficulties in developing and delivering VR-based content have, however, restricted its use. 

ViRSE (Virtual Reality Student Experience) is a newly developed Imperial College software platform for the delivery of teaching through Virtual Reality, designed to erode these barriers. Particular applications are developed as ViRSE plugins (‘worlds’) within the Unity Game Engine. Applications can be specific to a particular exercise or can be more generic ‘virtual laboratories’ re-usable for different courses. ViRSE provides rich ‘multiplayer’ environments and a suite of tools to simplify world development. 

This presentation will introduce ViRSE, explain how it can be used in teaching, and how you can go about developing worlds for use in the platform. For further information, please see www.imperial.ac.uk/virse.

Teaching Fellow Lunches 2022

8 December 2022

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Learning and Teaching job family review

 Charlotte Kestner (FoNS), Cloda Jenkins (Business School, Jeffrey Vernon (Medicine) and Robert Chatley (FoE)

Over the past year, a working group of teaching staff from across the College worked with Professor Emma McCoy to review the various job levels, descriptions and titles that Imperial has within the Learning and Teaching family. They compared our structures and pathways with those at peer universities, and discussed extensively with teaching staff across Imperial. As a result of this they have developed a proposal for a revised set of descriptions for roles at the different levels that they hope colleagues will find helpful when thinking about their career progression.

The recent changes in College senior management have meant there has been a short hiatus in moving this forward, and so they are taking this opportunity to present some of the work done so far, the background and thinking behind it, and to get input from the wider community.

2 November 2022

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Widening Participation Initiative

Jackie Bell

Jackie will be talking about a cross-departmental project to support widening participation (WP) students in their transition to 2nd year undergraduate study. The project aims to improve the progression and retention of WP engineering students at Imperial, making them feel part of the Imperial community and introducing them to future pathways into research and academia. 

 

6 May 2022

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Facultech Tool 

James Moss

This month we will be hearing from James Moss, who will be doing a presentation and demo of the Facultech tool. This is a web-based platform that was made to transparently and publicly promote teaching opportunities, overcome challenges in tutor recruitment, and empower teachers to make informed choices about what, how, and when they teach. 

 

 

8 April 2022

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Geographic Bias in Curricula 

Robyn Price and Mark Skopec

Imperial College has developed an analytics tool that presents data on the diversity of countries and country income level of journal article authors cited on College reading lists. There is currently data for over 13,000 articles cited by approximately 1,700 Imperial reading lists over different time periods. 

It has been created to help staff or students access data that may inform broader discussions about representation in curricula. The tool is available on request to staff and students who would like to engage in meaningful exploration of their curricula. Find more information here: Geographic bias in curricula | Administration and support services | Imperial College London