And that’s a wrap

The 3rd Annual Learning and Teaching Forum at the University of Sydney Business School concluded last week (18 Nov). Here’s a summary of the day and a taster for next year’s Forum.

The morning began with a rousing keynote address from Dr Amanda White, Associate Head (Education) of Accounting at UTS Business School. Her talk was titled Navigating the spectrums of online assessment and academic integrity, and navigate she did. Taking a deep dive into the somewhat prickly relationship between the two topics, she introduced us to the Fraud triangle (Cressey, 1971) as a framework to understand the many factors behind a student’s decision to cheat on exams and assignments.

She inspired us with her academic integrity wish list and left us with a range of ideas and suggestions to help navigate these issues including:

• Find a network of like minded individuals such as Australian Academic Integrity Network (Deakin University) or Twitter – Sarah Eaton (Canada), Tricia Bertram Gallant (USA), Thomas Lancaster (UK), Phillip Dawson,  Cath Ellis, Guy Curtis, Ann Rogerson
• Be sure to talk about the workload of raising cases with your Head
• Have a chat with your learning designers about assessment design
• Talk with your students about academic integrity – not just the penalties – but why it is important and how they can get support

Sharing successes and challenges

Follwoing the keynote, we moved on to the main presenation sessions of the forum, which were split into three streams of showcase sessions and lightening talks. A selection of the many interesting sessions included: Managing Student Comms with AI and Machine Learning (Cannell & Hadiwidjaja); Practitioner Review and Personalised Feedback (Luff); A co-design Approach for Understanding Complexity (Raduescu & El-Den); Tales of the Unexpected: Teaching Turmoil and Triumphs in Times of Crisis (Mitchell et al); Digital innovation by 2030 -wishful thinking? (Vallis & Petersen).

Links to slides and recordings from both days of the conference are available on the Learning and Teaching Forum program website.

Looking back

If I look back over the past three years of co-chairing the USBS L&T Forum, I would say we continue to see a diverse range of L&T innovations; the keynotes cover complex issues in HE; there is (for obvious reasons) a growing demand for sharing experiences of online learning and teaching; the presentation titles are becoming more creative (No $#%& cheat learn play: the rules of the game); acronyms are still omnipresent (we had 4Ys, 3Ps and 4Ds!); we lost our workshops (in the move to online) but have grown our student involvement (“Feeling apart” vs “Feeling a part of”).

As Associate Professor Peter Bryant said in his closing remarks, none of this is easy, but all of it makes a difference. Don’t just take it from us – here is what some of our participants this year took away from the Forum, and please do share yours.

The future is here

So what is coming next? We asked our panel to reflect on the future of Education and they told us a range of things including modularisation and personalisation (Geoff Perry), growth of contract cheating leading to devaluing of the degree (Rebecca Dinnie), and creating value propositions and developing resilience (Eliza Wu).

We would love to grow our audience and presentations further by inviting other Business educators to contribute. Also, if you would like to be part of the organising committee next year – do reach out and let us know.

So that just leaves me to say thank you to all the presenters, and especially to my co-chair Assoc Prof Angela Knox, our amazing event coordinator Kath McNulty and the wonderful organising committee, Dr Dewa Wardak, Dr Maria Ishikova, Wes Hammilton-Jessop, Assoc Prof Ranjit Voola, Dr Sabina Cerimagic, Dr Paul Finn and our event administrator Georgia Short.