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The profile of our education is "rising rapidly", Provost tells UCL conference

22 April 2016

UCL's annual Teaching and Learning Conference on Tuesday hosted more than 600 participants - including a record number of students.

UCL conference The conference, now in its fourth year, was at one point the highest trending event in London on Twitter and had tweets from, among other countries, Brazil, Turkey and the US.

Participants could choose from more than 100 presentations from topics as diverse as race and student-teacher relations, how to prevent plagiarism and how to help postgraduate prepare for the workplace.

Over 20 student presenters

A record 22 of the presentations were from students - signalling a shift in culture towards more of a partnership between staff and students than in the past.

One of the students presenting was Tobias Büschel, an MSc computer science student, who used Slack.com - a cloud-based team collaboration tool - to vastly improve communication among his classmates about course topics. In just six months, students on his course had sent at least 116,000 messages and shared more than 2,600 files using the tool.

Tobias told the conference that when he started his course, he felt like a "lonely programmer" and wondered "how to get in touch with fellow students on my course". He had tried Facebook, WhatsApp and Moodle, but none were intuitive enough to have a proper dialogue. "how is it that we live in the 21st Century and emerge ourselves in Virtual Reality and we still can't find a way to communicate in a fun and intuitive way. I thought, if Slack works for start-ups, why not for higher education."

Tobias is now one of the UCL ChangeMakers - an initiative which involves teams of students and staff working together to investigate an issue at UCL and make improvements. He is working on creating a Slack community for all students in the computer science department.

The "human side" of lecturers

Another presentation was about how a group of PhD students and undergraduates had filmed their lecturers talking about their hobbies and day-to-day lives to show that lecturers too have "a human side". Abigail Mountain, who is doing a PhD in the chemistry department on modelling the production of rubbers with the aim to make the process more eco-friendly, said: "I remember being a first or second year undergraduate and referring to a lecturer as 'the Scottish one'. I think it helps to know them as real people with hobbies. We've found they are more than happy to talk about their interests and show their human side."

Professor Michael Arthur, the President and Provost of UCL, told the conference that the profile of education at UCL was "rising rapidly". "I couldn't be more pleased with the progress we are making in education," he said. "It feels to me like we have taken the lid off education here. I became an academic because I believed in the relationship between teaching and research and over my career, I have seen those things pulled apart ... I have focused on bringing them back together - this is an absolutely central tenet of UCL 2034 - UCL's 20-year strategy. The responses and the effort we have seen has been huge."

Professor Anthony Smith, Vice-Provost (Education and Student Affairs) said the ambition was to make UCL "the best place in the world for the integration of research and education and to give our students an outstanding experience".

As part of the conference, 14 members of staff were awarded the Provost's Teaching Award, while 10 received a Student Choice Teaching Award, for which students made up the judges. The winners will be profiled on the UCL Teaching and Learning Portal over the coming weeks.

The conference was organised by UCL's Centre for Advancing Learning and Teaching.

Office of the Vice-Provost (Education and Student Affairs)