Future Plans

Guidelines

The purpose of this [section] is not only to give the assessor a sense of your future aims, but also help you plan for your professional development.

In the short term, I am keen to learn more about Xerte and how it can be used to support teaching. I am a complete novice with this platform and will need to start from scratch, learning about its capabilities and reflecting on how these can support various areas of my own teaching and the support I give students within the remit of Academic Skills. The University of York supports the use of Xerte and has set up an online resource that gives an overview of what Xerte can do, some help with training, and templates to use in teaching (About Xerte at The University of York). This will be a good place for me to start to familiarise myself with what it can do. I can then move on to talking to colleagues who have used it to support their teaching to learn from their experiences. Together, this will inform how I can use Xerte to support my teaching.

Perhaps a longer term project is to learn more about using technology to support alternative forms of assessment. Our Blackboard VLE offers some of these tools (e.g. online journals, wikis) but this is quite limited. I will be looking out for events to attend whereby colleagues are presenting the different tools they've used for blogs, vlogs, podcasts and other types of assessments. I am interested to learn what has and hasn't worked with the different tools to allow me to make an informed decision about what is the most appropriate tool(s) for our students and for the different assessments we'd like to use. I foresee this as a longer term project because I feel I will need a wide range of evidence from colleagues both within and outside of the University to show that these assessments work, are received positively by students, and test the associated learning outcomes. This will be important to try to persuade colleagues in the department to embrace these alternative forms of assessments. Additionally, I will need to convince both staff and students that the support will be in place to enable students to succeed with these different types of assessments. Thus, the lessons I learn from colleagues will be paramount in ensuring the Academic Skills provision can rise to the occasion.