Professor Lewis Elton

Honorary Professor of Higher Education

Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching
University College London
1-19 Torrington Place
London WC1E 6BT
Phone (Home): 01483 576548
Fax (Home): 01483 569119
E-mail: l.elton@pcps.ucl.ac.uk

Current work: Research student supervisor and Adviser on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching, UCL; Visiting Professor in Higher Education, Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning, University of Manchester; Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education
Broad research interests: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Management and Change in Universities, Quality Assessment and Enhancement
Specific research interests [all in higher education]: Innovations in Teaching, Learning and Assessment, Dissemination of innovations, Trust and accountability, Innovatory approaches to quality assessment, Change management, Predicting unintended consequences.

BRIEF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY

Professor Emeritus of Higher Education, University of Surrey, where I was Professor of Physics (1964 – 70) and Professor of Higher Education (1970 – 88). I am an Independent Consultant in Higher Education and in this capacity acted as a Higher Education Adviser to the Employment Department (and later the Department for Education and Employment) from 1989 to 1994 and to numerous universities in UK, Ireland, Germany, South Africa, Hong Kong in the past seventeen years.

In 1994, I was appointed as the first Professor of Higher Education at University College London and founded the Higher Education Research and Development Unit (now Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching) with Professor Stephen Rowland as my successor).

My work over the past seventeen years has included: Chairing a Task Force on ‘Staff Development in Relation to Research’ and leading a national seminar on ‘Management for Learning in Higher Education’, both published by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (now called ‘Universities UK’) and evaluating the Quality Assessment programme of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. At UCL I developed a Postgraduate course on ‘Research and Development in Higher Education’ for experienced academic teachers through distance learning and I have been the External Examiner for similar courses at the Universities of Oxford and Hong Kong and at the Dublin Institute of Technology. I was appointed as Visiting professor (part-time) in Higher Education, University of Manchester in August 2005.

CURRENT WORK AT UCL

I have been collaborating with a number of Departments (at present and in the recent past Primary Care and Population Science, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Educational Psychology) on curriculum developments based on student centred and problem based learning, I recently supervised an MA student in the School of Public Policy. Within the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching, I supervise a research student and advise on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

WORK at NATIONAL and INTERNATIONAL LEVEL

I collaborate with a large number of colleagues, half my age (which is the best way of keeping up-to-date) on research publications and conference presentations in Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand; I am adviser to the German Ausschuss for Hochschuldidaktik. I am a Visiting Professor in Higher Education, Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning, University of Manchester and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education.

HONOURS

Fellow of the American Institute of Physics, Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education, Honorary Life Member of the Staff and Educational Development Association, Doctorates(honoris causa) of the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Gloucestershire. I was awarded the Times Higher Lifetime Achievement Award 2005 and presented with a Festschrift by my former students: P. Ashwin (ed),'Changing Higher Education', Routledge 2006.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS SINCE 2000

'Small group work and teaching for understanding'. CDT Link, National University of Singapore, 4(1), 4, 2000.

'Dangers of doing the wrong thing righter’, HAN conference Proceedings, January 2000, 7 – 9.

'The UK Research Assessment Exercise: Unintended Consequences'. Higher Education Quarterly, 54 (2000), 274 – 283.

'Turning Academics into Teachers: a discourse on love'. Teaching in Higher Education 5 (2000), 257 – 260.

'Funding research and teaching’, 25th IUT Conference, Frankfurt, 17 – 20.7.00, 257 – 261.

'Research and Teaching: Conditions for a positive link', Teaching in Higher Education, 6 (2001), 43 – 56.

'Training for a craft or a profession’, Teaching in Higher Education 6 (2001), 421 – 422.

'Could undergraduate physics teaching be better?’, LTSN Physical Sciences News 2(2), (2001), 3.

'Continuing professional development of academic teachers through self-initiated learning'. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 27 (2002), 117 – 129. (With L Stefani)

'Assessment in Universities: a critical review of research’, LTSN (Generic), 2002, ASS 013 (with Brenda Johnston)

'Quality Assurance through Quality Enhancement’, Educational Development 2.4 (2001), 1 – 3.
’Assessment in Materials Science’, LTSN Materials Science 2003.

'Some Thoughts on Scholarship’, Educational Developments 4.4 (2003), 7 – 8.

'Dissemination of innovations in higher education: a change theory approach’, LTSN Generic and Tertiary Education and Management 9 (2003), 199 – 214.

'Principles for a Fair and Honest Approach to Assessing and Representing Students Learning and Achievement', LTSN(Generic), 2003.

'Goodhart’s Law and Performance Indicators in Higher Education’, Conference on Evidence-based Policies and Indicator Systems, July 2003.Published in: ‘Education in a changing environment’, Conference at Salford University, 2003, 2 – 10.

'University Finance – a ‘European’ norm?’, Perspectives 8, 18 – 20 (2004) (with L. Lucas)

'Should classification of the UK honours degree have a future?’, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 2004, 29, 413 – 420.

'Continuing Professional Development in Higher Education: Trust and Accountability’, Higher Education Digest 49 (2004), Digest Supplement, pp. 5 – 7.

'A challenge to assessment practice’, Higher Education Quarterly 58 (2004), pp 43 - 62.

'German and UK Higher Education and Graduate Employment: The Interface between Systemic Tradition and Graduate Views’ (with B. Johnston), Comparative Education 41 (2005), pp 351 - 373.

'Britain’s Relationship to the Bologna Declaration’, Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung 27(2) (2005), pp 31 – 44.

‘Recent developments in Student Learning in Britain and their relationship to the Bologna Declaration’, Papers 76 (2005), pp. 33 – 45. [In : ‘Papers - Revista de sociologia’, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona]

‘Scholarship and the Research and Teaching Nexus’, in R. Barnett (ed), ‘Reshaping the University’, SRHE/Open University Press, 2005.

‘Could there be a balance between top down and collegial management in universities?’4th Annual Conference on Leadership Research, Lancaster, 12 – 13. 12. 2005

‘Using e-learning in assessment for learning: a case-study of a web-based course in primary care’, (with J Russell, D Swinglehurst, T Greenhalgh), Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 31 (2006), pp. 465 – 478.

‘Academic Professionalism: the need for change’, in C. Bryan and K. Clegg (eds), ‘Innovative assessment in higher education’, Routledge 2006.

‘Research-teaching linkages: a response’, academy exchange 3, 2006, pp. 32 -33

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