UCU NEC Elections 2022: London and National

I'm standing for election to UCU's National Executive Committee, for the London and East Region (as I work at a university in London) but also for the UK if I don't get elected to one of the London seats. Here's my election address.

The View from the Other Side

By Santanu Vasant PFHEA, Head of Teaching Excellence and the ExPERT Academy at the University of West London. Follow Santanu on Twitter at @santanuvasant The blog post is a write up of a conference presentation I gave at the University of East London’s annual Learning and Teaching Symposium, where I was previously the Head of …

HyFlex and Hybrid teaching: reflections on my first experience

I recently had my first experience of HyFlex (Hybrid Flexible) teaching, where some participants are online (via Microsoft Teams in my case) and some are in the classroom. It was exciting and unsettling in equal measure: stressful and frustrating at times, but also a real sense of being at the edge of what's possible in …

Are we there yet? What I’ve learned from being a slow runner

This post was inspired by Dr Dani Rabaiotti’s thread on running:  https://twitter.com/DaniRabaiotti/status/1379001330694557699?s=20 I wrote my own thread in response, and it turns out I have a lot of feelings about running. This post is really, really long as a consequence. But it has a bit at the end about pedagogy. If you just want the …

Where is Higher Education during the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

Santanu Vasant, Senior Learning Technology Adviser at the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, University of East London, asks where is higher education during the fourth industrial revolution? 

In defence of inclusive language

Another day ending in 'y', another lazy headline attempting to foment a 'culture war': this time, the Spectator would like us to believe that 'Ahead of Mother's Day, Manchester University has scrapped the word "mother".' Really? Anyone familiar with the publication will already know the answer: no. They've released a (very good, incidentally) 'inclusive language …

Accessing employer-provided counselling: my experience in UK Higher Education.

This post is about my experience of accessing counselling through my employer’s Employee Assistance Programme, and what such counselling can and can’t do. It’s Time to Talk Day on 4th February: a day organised by Time to Change (between Mind and Rethink Mental Illness) to encourage people to ‘talk’ about mental health, ending stigma and …

Caption.Ed: captions that travel with you

This post is a review of Caption.Ed, a Chrome extension that automatically captions any audio and video content that a user comes across online. Full disclosure: I was given a free trial. However, I have not been paid to write this, nor have I been pressured into writing anything in particular. What I write here …

Putting the ‘design’ back into ‘curriculum design’: why is design thinking important in curriculum creation?

(N.B. This post is written as a reading for the module ACAD1287: Learning Design and Evaluation on the University of Greenwich's PGCert and Award in Learning and Teaching in HE). We often talk about curriculum ‘design’: but when we create a curriculum for our students, what do we mean by the ‘design’ part? In this …

Guest post: Educational Development Centres – Issues, Challenges and the Future

(This is a guest post by Santanu Vasant, Head of UEL's Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching as part of #HEBlogswap) As you may know, I am coming up to a year in the post of Head of the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the University of East London. I have …