On 21st June we attended the NTU Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, which was all about "Creating Opportunity" this year, and we have shared our experience by gathering together some of the great sharing that happened on Twitter.

#creatingopportunityNTU

As Beth mentioned, with up to six simultaneous sessions throughout the day, there was far too much for us to cover, even with us splitting up and reporting back to each other:

We began by attending the keynote by Professor Momodou Sallah, which discussed the benefits of blurring the boundaries between the classroom and the “real world” – bringing the real world into the classroom and the classroom into the real world:

Immediately afterwards we ran our workshop on fostering engagement and peer support through flexible collaborative learning activities. As examples of these sorts of activities we talked about our Arts and Humanities colleagues’ work (featured in past blog posts): Jane Vickers’ collaborative glossary and Sarah Khan’s student collaboration in Microsoft Teams.

We had fantastic engagement from the attendees, and there was a real buzz to the session as we asked colleagues who didn’t know each other to work together to write a summary of peer-supported learning activity on post-its. Several attendees said they were inspired by the practice shared, and planned to try some of the activities in their own teaching.

There were also presentations from colleagues within the School of Arts and Humanities. Lia Blaj-Ward co-presented on the Design Thinking Mindset (and appeared on the Plenary panel):

Sarah Khan and Amy Wang presented together on “Creating and using collaborative opportunities for whole person development”:

Chris Reynolds co-presented on the History and Illustration 1968 project, which resulted in an immersive installation in Nottingham Castle.

Lisa Clughen co-presented two different sessions on Mindful Movement, including a practical session held outdoors:

During lunch and networking times we had the opportunity to take a look at some of the posters by APA/PGCert students:

And we were delighted to find that so many of the posters have been made available digitally on the National Teaching Repository, including the slides of our workshop.

And before we knew it, it was coming to an end:

Thanks so much to the TILT team for organising such an impressive, and useful, conference.