This is a themed session consisting of four linked presentations exploring how the Centre for Innovation in Higher Education supports innovative teaching and pedagogic research across Anglia Ruskin University:
1. How the Centre for Innovation in Higher Education drives and enhances multi-disciplinary pedagogic innovation: This session will show how CIHE works with academic colleagues from various subject backgrounds to design creative rigorous educational research evidence the impact of their teaching attract funding and produce high-quality scholarly publications.
2. Inspire to aspire: The impact of inquiry-based and team-based learning strategies on developing undergraduate science students’ research skills: This project evaluates the impact of flipped inquiry-based and team-based learning on student satisfaction and research skills acquisition by comparing the performance of two cohorts of students on a shared Research Skills module. This parallel cohort structure with over 200 students facilitates a data-rich comparison of the impact of these active learning strategies on the acquisition of research skills and methods and on student engagement and scientific aspirations. This presentation will share findings from the first and second phases of analysis and discuss strategies for embedding active and reflective learning techniques successfully into large-group teaching.
3. Piecing it together: Evaluating the jigsaw technique: The Jigsaw Technique is increasingly valued in higher education as an active learning method. This presentation will give an overview of the technique and its pedagogical roots and share how the approach has been adapted and integrated into a range of discipline-specific contexts across all five faculties at Anglia Ruskin University including Forensic Science Marketing Nursing and Sociology. Delegates will discover how the jigsaw technique can foster a collaborative learning community and build students’ confidence and engagement. The presentation will share initial findings on the impact of the technique on students’ development of pedagogical literacies across the five faculties.
4. Using virtual reality to develop students’ empathy reflection and decision-making: The use of immersive technologies for education is an emerging field and the impact of this approach needs to be better understood. This presentation will explore how we have approached the design production and deployment of an immersive community care scenario for nurses set in a service-user’s home. It will outline the theoretical grounding that informed this project and discuss the affordances of digital inscription - the overlaying of information such as questions prompts and interactive media - and how these can be exploited in virtual reality environments to support the development of empathy reflection and decision-making skills.
