HEFi Newsletter - May 2023
HEFi Conference 2023
"Very good organisation particularly from the point of view of being a presenter/speaker. A fantastic effort from the whole of the HEFi team."
"I was very pleased with everything. Thank you for organising such an engaging event."
The HEFi Festival and Conference gave staff at the University a chance to come together to discuss and debate topical issues in higher education. The Festival was held online, giving staff access to a range of practical CPD and spaces to talk about issues that affect teaching and learning. The Conference saw over 230 staff enjoy the opportunity to network face-to-face and explore a rich programme of academic papers, discussion groups and lightning sessions around Educational Gain. HEFi was delighted to welcome colleagues across the week and thank you to all of those colleagues around the institution who supported them. Recordings and resources will all be made available soon via the Conference App.
We were pleased to have representatives from Canvas and PebblePad, two of our main institutional digital tools for education, join us at our HEFi23 Conference. Lain Hough (Canvas) and Paul Duvall (PebblePad) spent the day speaking to our academics about different ways to use these institutional tools, and gave a presentation (available to view on the Conference app) about what improvements their companies are currently prioritising.
We had a very successful social media campaign this year with over 22,000 individual views on our #HEFi23 hashtag alone 556 likes and 153 tweets on the day. Fueled partly by the conference social media wall in the foyer of the Alan Walters building hopefully, you spotted your tweet on there. If you are interested in following HEFi on Twitter you can find us @UOB_HEFi, we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who tweeted and was involved in the conversation, please follow us on Twitter to get involved in future HEFi conversations.
HEFi Festival 2023
First of all, we would like to send a huge thanks to our presenters and attendees for making the Festival week such an engaging, thought-provoking and collaborative week. Alongside our conference, the Festival featured 13 continuing professional development sessions, including a co-delivered student panel on generative artificial intelligence. We are delighted to be able to share the recordings and slides from the week, all available on our
Events Canvas page.
Assessment and feedback & Generative AI- The Student Perspective.Do you know how your students feel about generative AI? As part of this year's HEFi festival one of our student partners, Emen Hussain, convened a panel of seven students and facilitated a discussion about their understanding and experience of using generative AI. They told uswhat their worries and hopes were, and the role they imagined generative AI playing in the future of education and employment. If you didn't get a chance to attend you can watch the
recording here.
Education in Practice
HEFi is pleased to announce that it has relaunched the University learning and teaching journal, Education in Practice. A new issue was published to coincide with the HEFi annual conference (HEFi23) earlier in May, with all delegates receiving a printed copy. The journal is also available online.
Education in Practice is intended to provide a platform for UoB colleagues relatively new to writing for publication. The new issue provided a platform for colleagues who completed our PGCHE programme, or carried out educational enhancement projects at UoB (among others).
Contributions are now being sought for the next issue of the journal, due out in autumn 2023. See the journal intranet site for details of how to submit an article.