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The Centre has now identified representatives in HE Physical Sciences departments. Departmental Representatives provide a link between the Subject Centre and individual institutions. Through them, we are able to more effectively assess both the learning and teaching needs of the community and those of individual departments. Regional meetings with Centre staff and Departmental Representatives were held in June 2001. A second annual meeting was held 8th May 2002 at Manchester.
The Centre supports the development of special interest groups to identify, support, develop and monitor work in specific areas of the curriculum or in specific approaches to learning and teaching. Such sub-groups will be supported in the dissemination and publication of their work.
If you would like LTSN Physical Sciences to visit your institution, your Departmental Representative can facilitate this. He or she will also have copies of all the Centre's publications and details of forthcoming events. To find out who your Departmental Representative is, please contact the Centre.
Many colleagues have developed resources, approaches, strategies and materials which effectively promote student learning in chemistry, physics and astronomy, related disciplines and professional skills development. Such materials or ideas may seem 'run-of-the-mill' to a particular practitioner or situation but may be novel and interesting to other academics.
We are encouraging all colleagues in chemistry, physics and astronomy to submit summaries of such practices and materials to our resource database. Each author of accepted entries will receive a £25 book token.
Remember, what is routine to you may be novel in a different situation.
Submit your information directly via our website or email us for more details.
Report for FDTL 4 Projects networking meeting 26th Feb 2003 at Loughborough
The fourth phase of FDTL (Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning) included the disciplines Physics and Astronomy; Bioscience; and Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research.
Projects successful in Physics and Astronomy
Projects successful in Bioscience (applicable to the physical sciences)
Projects successful in Maths, Stats and OR (applicable to the physical sciences)
Details of these projects will be posted here when they become available.
Full list of successful projects
The FDTL projects are co-ordinated by the Teaching Quality enhancement Fund National Co-ordination Team (TQEF NCT), based at the Open University in Milton Keynes, as they have done for the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP). The NCT works on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Department for Higher and Further Education, Training and Employment (DHFETE), of Northern Ireland.
A new discussion list,
physsci-fdtl@jiscmail.ac.uk, has been set up. You are invited to join this
new discussion list, by either sending a message to
jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk with no
subject title and containing only the text:
join physsci-fdtl Firstname Lastname
or, by visiting the jisc website, www.jiscmail.ac.uk.
If you require any further information please contact Simone Richardson (s.richardson@surrrey.ac.uk) LTSN Physical Sciences Development Officer.
We are in the process of producing a new publication, 'New Directions in the Teaching of Physical Sciences'. The broad aim of this publication is to identify and disseminate innovative work in the respective fields of physics/astronomy and chemistry teaching. The intention is to publicise the good work of practitioners and highlight the availability of useful, relevant resources which you might consider helpful for your own teaching. We expect that new versions will be published annually.
If you have been engaged in any such activities this year, or are currently undertaking work (or even know of any useful activities or colleagues working in this field) which you would like to be considered for publication we would love to hear from you. We have a standard template so as to make submissions of work easier. For more details, contact Paul Chin at the Centre.
One of the problems of designing new experiments for students is the time required for development or a lack of practice someone has in a particular experimental method. This can come about if the academic does not have the time to dedicate to develop and test a new practical or if that person belongs to a small department or unit that lacks in-depth experience of running a particular experiment.
Therefore, in response to a call for help from the physical sciences subject community, we have initiated a project to develop a database of practicals that academics can use in their teaching activities. The aim for this project is to allow someone interested in running an experiment to be able to download a practical from the database and use it with their students.
To make this database a valuable and extensive resource which all academics can tap into, we are looking for help from the community to provide examples of experiments which they are willing to have included in the database. Even if most people only offered one example from their own work, this could soon add up to several hundred practicals which the whole community could benefit from. Anyone submitting a practical that is accepted for inclusion in the database will receive £50 in book tokens.
If you would like to submit a practical for inclusion in the database we have produced a short web form which asks you to provide us with an outline of your work. After submission we will also ask you to provide an electronic copy of your practical script, which other academics could use or adapt for their own teaching activities. We will be encouraging users to offer feedback on the success of any practicals used, to help future development of this service and the resources contained within it.