Last year, the annual UTS Learning and Teaching Forum was fully online for the first time. With an umbrella theme of Connecting Current Practice with Future Direction, we heard from students, academics and professional staff on wide-ranging topics from climate change toolkits to building in belonging for Indigenous students. This year, the forum is once again online and we are looking for contributors to present on the theme of feedback.
This year’s theme: Putting feedback for learning to practice
The 2021 UTS Learning and Teaching Forum is being held on Monday 29 November. It will focus on enhancing the student experience by exploring the ways we create learning opportunities and support learning through feedback. It aims to promote feedback for learning, as outlined in the learning.futures strategy, which locates feedback as a process through which students make sense of their learning and performance, and use feedback to enhance the quality of their work or learning strategies.
Feedback for learning goes well beyond providing comments on assessment tasks. It is feedback which aims to make a difference; to consider how students:
- gain and respond to feedback as part of class and online activities
- gain and give peer feedback
- develop their capacity to judge and improve their own work as students and future professionals
The day of presentations will invite us to:
- question how we, and our students, think about feedback
- explore how we prepare students to receive, respond to, give and act on feedback that supports learning
- examine how we use student action as feedback on our own teaching practice, as well as considering the capabilities academics need and can develop to do this well
Call for contributions
We invite you to bring the lens of feedback to your practice and contribute to the forum. In particular, we encourage submissions which showcase aspects of practice related to:
- Inclusivity/universal design
- Use of technology-enhanced feedback such as automated feedback, and using audio and video recordings
- Developing students’ and teachers’ feedback literacy
- Enhancing students’ capability to judge the quality of their work and that of others (i.e., evaluative judgement through rubrics, standards-based approaches, exemplars, reflections, self/peer reviews, etc.)
- Engaging industry in feedback, building professional practice
- Enhancing the student experience (building belonging, early feedback, peer feedback)
- Collaborations across subjects (or the course) and in teaching teams
- Large classes and addressing scale
Submit your contribution using our online form. This will guide you in creating your submission where the aim is to focus on the challenge, your feedback practice ‘in action’, how it went, and what you learned.
Successful submissions will be grouped thematically into concurrent sessions where each presenter (or each group of presenters) will be invited to deliver a 10-minute presentation, and then engage actively with colleagues in exploring the theme, including how it might connect with your practice.
Important dates
- Tuesday 16 November (10am) – Deadline for submissions
- Friday 19 November – Notification of receipt and successful submissions announced
- Monday 29 November – UTS Learning and Teaching Forum
Register now to secure your place and be updated with event details in the coming weeks. Any questions relating to the forum can be sent to IML_OPS@uts.edu.au. We look forward to hearing from you!