College of Engineering built Lightboard

Today Matthew and I dropped in to see the launch of a Lightboard built by a group of undergraduate electrical students from the College of Engineering. “A lightboard is a glass chalkboard pumped full of light. It’s for recording video lecture topics, you face towards your viewers, and your writing…

Continue reading

Clearing and Beyond

It has been an incredibly busy ten days or so for many, many people across the University, but we have now reached our threshold numbers for home and EU undergraduate numbers. Both I, and the rest of the Senior Management Team, would therefore like to thank everybody involved for all…

Continue reading

Reflecting on Excellence

As I listened to the news earlier this week one of the headlines was quoting Jo Johnson as saying that Universities must wipe out mediocre teaching and drive up student engagement. The less well informed media claimed that he had laid out new plans to cut the fees of universities that…

Continue reading

Response to NSS 2016

The NSS data is released today and it is clear that Swansea has not done as well as it did last year. I think we can still be very pleased with an overall satisfaction score of 90% but there are clearly issues in other parts of the survey that we…

Continue reading

White Paper, UK Legislation and TEF Update

One of the primary purposes for having a PVC’s blog is to keep colleagues at Swansea up to date with developments around the UK government’s White Paper ‘Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice’, the subsequent legislation, the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and the response to this from various relevant…

Continue reading

PVC Blog Introduction: The Swansea Graduate

We have now reached the end of another academic year, my first full academic year at Swansea. On Monday I had the privilege of taking part in the first graduation ceremonies to take place in the new Great Hall on the Bay Campus. The sun was out, the crowds of…

Continue reading

SALT Conference 2016

The 8th annual SALT conference is about to begin. You can follow the live stream if you are unable to make it in person, see the link below:

Continue reading

Using feedback to feedforward

Feedback image indicating a dialogic process

The HEA ran a project called Student Enhanced Learning through Effective Feedback (SENLEF), it was a project funded by the LTSN Generic Centre (now Higher Education Academy) to develop a resource for practitioners wishing to improve their feedback practice to students or get some new ideas on how to enhance…

Continue reading

Group-work or working in a group?

Here is Mandy Jack abseiling off the top of Kilvey Hall of residence, behind Fulton House. She was part of the ISS team Book drop fundraising for SOS Africa. Video and images by Deb Baff Not exactly the type of group work we would normally be writing about here in…

Continue reading