Some favorite blogs on learning and teaching

I quite regularly share my favourite podcasts on learning and teaching, but now it seems it’s time to share some of my favorite blogs! Despite me blogging myself, I don’t read blogs as regularly as I used to (mostly because I don’t want to spend even more time in front of a screen, and podcasts combine well with walks and taking water pictures), but here are some I really like!

Agnes Bosanquet (of the legendary Contemporary Approaches to University Teaching MOOC, which we are drawing a lot of inspiration from for our own MOOC!) writes The Slow Academic with, for example, a series on “reflecive practice over a cuppa” (love a good micro opportunity for learning and reflection!). Agnes is definitely my “generous scholarship” role model!

Nathalie Tasler writes about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and about academic development more generally. One post that I loved gives tips for how to do the dreaded powerpoint karaoke when you have to teach with someone else’s slides and they don’t make immediate sense to you. The trick is to include students in the sense-making: Knowing the teacher, they might have context that you don’t, and generally it can be a really productive conversation to try and interpret what someone might have wanted to convey with a slide — much better than you trying to guess and pretend that you know!

EuroSoTL has a (relatively new) blog with posts from many different people. Two stand out to me:

• Sue Beckingham recently introduced “The SoTL staircase” (which we directly used here!), a visualisation of the many different ways of “going public” with SoTL work; from talking with colleagues, over social media, conferences, and different kinds of publications. Very helpful to lower the threshold (or break it down into smaller steps!)
• Earle Abrahamson wrote about “synaptic pathways” and how we need to make sure that all kinds of connections are in place and working so that new ideas and insights can flow freely to where they are needed.

The University of Edinburgh runs the blog “Teaching Matters” (which has been running for a decade already! I remember meeting the colleague responsible for the blog at a conference and being super impressed with the work then, and I have been reading on and off ever since!). Most recently, I really enjoyed reading a post about a two-stage exam meeting co-creation (about which Levy et al. (2023) write “Two-stage examinations consist of a first stage in which students work individually as they typically do in examinations (stage 1), followed by a second stage in which they work in groups to complete another examination (stage 2), which typically consists of a subset of the questions from the first examination“, and in which students generally perform much better in stage 2 while also experiencing less stress as in a traditional exam…).

Also always worth checking out: Rachel Forsyth’s blog Assessment in Higher Education. Lots of great posts about different facets of assessment, for example on the illusion of precision grading. Also, Rachel is hilarious.

I only very recently discovered Beyond the Scope, but identified very strongly with the thoughts in “an honest perspective on independent scholarship“, which discusses the pros and cons of employment/freelancing as academic developer. But there are so many other helpful posts on that blog, for example the thoughtful discussion on how to navigate students’ needs or preference to have access to lecture slides in advance, especially when there are disabilities both on the student’s and instructor’s side.

Last not least: Picking up ducks is about life on a longboat on the canals in the UK. My friend Rachel recommended it because she knows who the academic developer behind it is (so in my mind, it is stored as an academic development blog), but I mostly love it for showing all the different facets of canals — how some are not ship-able during droughts because they would run dry if you open a lock, how breaches also just drain whole stretches and take forever to repair, just seeing canal views in all kinds of weather and seasons. This is what I want to do, too, I just need to figure out how to take my work fully online!

One observation though: All the personal blogs I mention here are run by women! I wonder, do I just not read men’s blogs, or do men not blog about learning and teaching? (Quick google search shows lots of men blogging about learning and teaching, so I will read a bit and we’ll see if some of them make it to a future “favourite blogs” post… What are your favourite blogs that you recommend I check out?

Levy, D., Svoronos, T., & Klinger, M. (2023). Two-stage examinations: Can examinations be more formative experiences?. Active Learning in Higher Education, 24(2), 79-94.

Featured image and pics below from this morning’s walk to my morning dip.

I don’t know what it is with me and picknick benches with a sea view…