Close
UCL’s trajectory towards teaching and learning excellence.
As an institution, we have a strong track record of supporting our high-achieving undergraduates through to completion.
We endeavour to develop their research and communication abilities so that they graduate with good degrees, and we advise and mentor them through to highly skilled employment.
They have told us that there is more that we need to do, however, particularly on assessment and feedback. We have taken this very seriously. Our priority now is to respond strategically and with urgency to their concerns.
In 13-14, we embarked on a programme of major educational change, involving new leadership; a radical new framework for curriculum development and assessment; staffing expansion and a new approach to training and development. We also accelerated investment in services and facilities and reinvested in our working relationship with UCLU to make our students full partners in all our activity.
Education is now firmly at the heart of UCL’s institutional mission, and the steps we have taken to identify and mitigate our immediate challenges will be reinforced over the coming years as the longer-term impact of our cumulative efforts becomes clear.
Our work over the past three years has begun to be reflected both in engagement levels and satisfaction scores, and one final metric illustrates the momentum we are gathering.
In 13-14, 80 staff members registered for the institutional Teaching and Learning conference; that same event in 15-16 attracted over 800 participants, including student presenters and delegates, and the #UCLTL hashtag trended 4th highest in London during the day – no mean feat for an internal education event.
Such rapid growth in engagement, enthusiasm and participation indicates that we have the capacity and the will to undertake the work that undoubtedly remains to be done – but we look forward to the point in the near future where our metrics and our narrative submission both point clearly and unambiguously to the same evidence of our success.