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 2024
Generative AI, Nobel Prizes, Chatbot and the Metaverse
Chris Cooling and Stefano Sandrone
This event saw Chris Cooling present the major findings of the Early Career Researcher Institute (ECRI) research into how postgraduate students at Imperial use Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. The talk discussed the role of Generative AI in the research process at Imperial, and presented how ECRI supported postgraduate students using these tools. The second presentation saw Stefano Sandrone speak on one of his works about the concept of mentoring in the Nobel prize lectures and how to navigate the increasing presence of chatbots and the metaverse in the educational landscape. As the work on mentoring is currently under review, Stefano's talk is not available online.
View the PowerPoint presentation for this event (Imperial login required).
Teaching Fellow Lunch Welcome Event
Eve Campbell, Martyn Kingsbury and Jane Sloan
This event introduced new starters in the teaching and learning job family to the teaching fellow network and a range of provisions offered by departments across Imperial. Eve Campbell, from the Education Office, presented on the community development initiatives available to colleagues such as the Talking Teaching events and Special Interest Groups. Martyn Kingsbury spoke on the CHERS and EDU offering which included resources to support both learning and research pedagogy and highlighted a range of qualifications available for fellows to obtain during their time at Imperial. Finally, Jane Sloan talked about the POD offering including specific programmes of interest to fellows such as how to get to grips with AI as well as schemes like mentoring which Jane leads on.
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
Ethics and Educational Research, Imperial's Education Ethics Review Process
Martyn Kingsbury
There is an ever-increasing need for ethics proposals submissions due to the vast amount of research done by our teaching fellows and therefore, this session will give you the opportunity to ensure your proposals are written in accordance with Imperial’s core values and principles.
Martyn will take you through the different types of ethics proposals at Imperial, tips for filling out the educational ethics proposal form and field questions on research requiring ethics conducted by our teaching fellows.
Teaching Fellow Lunches 2023
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
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?
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
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
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
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.
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
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.
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
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.
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
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
Sign Up
If you are interested in receiving the Learning and Teaching Newsletter, please email ltstrategy@ic.ac.uk.
You can also view the issue archive online.
Contact Us
If you are interested in presenting at a Teaching Fellow Lunch, please email ltstrategy@ic.ac.uk. To sign up for the Teaching Fellow Lunch distribution list, fill out this form.