Pillars of Learning
UCC EDTL lead Cliodhna O’Callaghan (@cliodhnacal) organised a hugely successful series of digital education sessions for UCC staff members over the last few months based on student feedback. Here, Cliodhna discusses these sessions and plans going forward for further digital training.
Teach Digi ‘Ag Caint’ is a UCC staff digital education training series organised by Clíodhna O’Callaghan, Project Lead for the IUA EDTL Project in UCC and is informed and underpinned by the student feedback as collated in the UCC Students Union Survey, October 2020. This feedback was summarised into five pillars, presented in the above graphic. The Teach Digi training series, in conjunction with the IUA ‘Enhancing Digital Teaching & Learning’ project, has as one of its four key pillars, ‘Students as Partners’. Therefore, ensuring the student voice is front and centre to our training is vital and no better way to ensure this than to directly reference their feedback as a framework for our training. The staff led sessions were hosted by the IUA EDTL Project Lead, Clíodhna O’Callaghan and the student led sessions were hosted by our Student Associate Intern, Ms. Catherine Dawson.
‘Ag Caint’ is the Irish for ‘chatting’ or ‘talking’ and the format of this Teach Digi training series includes a short ‘chat’ with a lecturer and a separate session with a student/learner in UCC on each of the five pillars. This is informal in nature, however, it focused firmly on some practical advice for staff on how they can adapt their teaching to incorporate some simple and accessible tips/advice from the lived experience of both staff and students of online teaching and learning in UCC. A live Q&A session follows the pre-recorded content focused specifically on the student feedback pillar, for example, Clarity, Consistency etc.
Due to the positive feedback on the ‘Ag Caint’ training series received by Clíodhna O’Callaghan & the CDE team we will continue to record more conversations with staff across the University specifically focussing on what is working and not working for them in the context of digital teaching and learning from both academic and professional staff. These will continue to be released on a weekly basis via the OVPLT weekly learning and teaching email. If you would like to be involved in this initiative or submit feedback for future staff training in the context of digital education, please contact Ms. Clíodhna O’Callaghan, Digital Education Officer & Project Lead for the IUA EDTL (Enhancing Digital Teaching & Learning) Project via email: c.ocallaghan@ucc.ie.
Follow the #IUADigEd social platforms for more: