Profile of our education is "rising rapidly", Provost tells conference

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

During the opening plenary, the conference was the highest trending event in London on Twitter.

Participants could choose from more than 100 presentations from topics as diverse as how to prevent plagiarism and whether the rise in tuition fees has affected students' motivation, behaviour and performance.

One particularly popular session, by Provost Teaching Award winner Dr Richard Freeman, a senior lecturer in research methods at the UCL Institute of Education, showed how to improve student satisfaction through Flipped Learning - where students watch video lectures at home so that time with their lecturers can be spent discussing any areas of difficulty.

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

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

Tobias told the conference: "I thought if Slack works for start-ups, why not for higher education too." He 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 - and is working on creating a Slack community for all students in the computer science department.

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. The responses and the effort we have seen has been huge."

Professor Anthony Smith, Vice-Provost (Education and Student Affairs) said he was delighted with the way the university had engaged with the vision of UCL 2034 and that core to this was the ambition of making UCL "the best place in the world for the integration of research and education and giving our students an outstanding experience".

Professor Smith singled out three particular successes: the UCL Connected Curriculum - a conceptual framework unique to UCL for integrating a research-based education into all taught programmes; UCL Arena, a professional development network for staff engaged in teaching, supervising, assessing or supporting students' learning and UCL ChangeMakers.

As part of the conference, 14 members of staff were presented with their 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, which was held at the UCL Institute of Education, was tweeted about from as far afield as Brazil, the US and Turkey. It was organised by UCL's Centre for Advancing Learning and Teaching.