A Year of Ups but also Downs

It has been an interesting (academic) year at Seery Towers and our fridge has had plenty of bubbly alcohol flowing through it. Some of the many highs of the year include becoming Director of Teaching, becoming Editor of Chemistry Education Research and Practice, running another MICER, publishing the Overton Festschrift, being elected Chair of the 2023 CERP Gordon Research Conference (wut?), and of course finding out in February (May, of course I mean May!) that I was promoted to Professor. Yay! Schadenfreude Academia is generally a place where we are used to talking about success. I think this is a…

Building evidence for teaching-focussed promotions

Almost all academic promotion criteria will list teaching activities as one of the core areas where candidates will need to demonstrate evidence, but there is a growing population of teaching-focussed/teaching-only/teaching and scholarship/teaching fellow staff where this criterion will obviously be much more important. Having been on a working group on this matter in my own university, been asked to write quite a lot of references for people in this population, and thinking about my own career, this topic has been close to my heart for the last few years, and I plan here to share some observations that might help…

A New Role

Such is the pace of life at the moment that major life events (well, major in my life anyway) pass by undocumented. In January I became Editor of the journal Chemistry Education Research and Practice, or as I like to call it “Chemistry Education Research and Practice – Free to Access“. CERP is the Royal Society of Chemistry’s education journal. I love CERP. I’m not just saying this now – here I am writing in 2011 about it. The fact that a learned Society such as the RSC gives its support to the journal speaks volumes about the high value…

Timeline entry page on VLE

VLEs are choccaful of information and we are doing a lot of thinking about how to make it as easy as possible to get to the relevant information. Previously our model has mimicked essentially what a computer folder on your desktop might look like – logically arranged but you sort of need to know the structure first before you can find anything. A nice idea I picked up while externing at MMU was a kind of “what’s new this week” timeline that is the entry page for a course. The model we’ve gone with is below. As each new week…

Promoting teaching focussed academics

I read with interest this series of blog posts on promotion in academia, discussing external promotions (having to move beyond your institution to get promoted), internal promotions, and using the former to achieve the latter. There is an additional layer of considerations for promotion of teaching focussed academics working in disciplinary departments (as opposed to education departments). The first is whether teaching focussed academics should be promoted on the basis of their work in teaching. The argument against is that if research is the traditional metric, then one who does not do research should not be promoted, and certainly not…

Reflecting on #MICER18

This week I ran the third Methods in Chemistry Education Research meeting (MICER18). It was a really interesting and useful day – we had a good range of speakers and lots of discussion; certainly the scope of the meeting this year was the most ambitious so far. As the meeting is beginning to settle into a space on the calendar, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to take it forward. For me MICER operates on three levels. At one level this meeting has a very simple purpose – to share approaches that can be used when doing educational research, and…

A memorable teaching scenario for #Chemedcarnival

Katherine Haxton has challenged us to write a blog post on a memorable teaching situation. When I was 19 I attended a Scout training weekend as part of a course to become a canoe instructor. I had been canoeing for several years under the patient instruction of canoe instructor, Keith, who was also a former scout leader. Keith is tall and patient and a scientist and has a clipped English accent with excellent projection. “Lean downstream, Mick” he’d boom up and down rivers, while I’d lean upstream, and capsize. All this made Keith very exotic. Coming from a small country…

The Likert Debate

David Read blew my cover on Sunday night with a tweet mentioning my averaging of Likert data in our recent work on badges. If there is ever a way to get educational researchers to look up from their sherry on a Sunday evening, this is it. Hadn't realised it before, but @seerymk advocates averaging of Likert scores in his excellent paper on digital badges: https://t.co/Zz8XJP8M5o. You can't argue with MKS, @PaulDuckmanton and @aw_mckinley! Certainly seems valid in this exploratory case. — David Read (@lowlevelpanic) February 4, 2018 Averaging Likert scales is fraught with problems. The main issue is that Likert…

When is a conference real?

Respected Dr Dr Mrs Seery, we hope that you can come to our conference in somewhere you’ve never heard of and tell us about your interesting and exciting work in Pre-Lecture Resources for Reducing Cognitive Load at our Conference on Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in Sub-Oceanic Conditions. Please reply. Most of us now receive daily invites to conferences around the world – oh the travel we could do! – and the usual fare is a greeting like that above; a dodgy mail merge of incorrect title, a paper title you have published and a conference that has a theme that…