It was with shock and great sadness that we learned the news of Brett’s death. Brett was a valued member of the EDIN committee for a number of years and a determined advocate for the value of teaching and learning in higher education in Ireland. He contributed regularly to EDIN conversations, to event organising, to our research, and particularly to the maintenance and development of the EDIN website. Brett was a distinguished scholar, an insightful and inventive thinker, and a wonderfully convivial colleague. We will greatly miss his intelligent and enthusiastic participation in EDIN work, his willingness to help, and his good humour.

We extend our deepest sympathies to his family and friends. We join them in grieving the passing of an exceptional scholar, colleague and friend.

Dr Alison Farrell
Chair, EDIN. 
December 2024.

EDIN AGM and Event

Our AGM will take place on Tuesday 25th June 2024 with an accompanying event sharing recent research and practice from across the network. Our venue is the Centre for Academic Practice, Trinity College Dublin. Details and directions available on registration.

Programme

12.30: Arrival and light lunch

13.00: EDIN AGM

13.30: ‘Plus ça change?’: reflecting on change across 20 years of Educational Developers in Ireland as part of planning for the future – Claire McAvinia, Alison Farrell and Íde O’Sullivan

14.15: Using GenAI in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education – Ana Schalk

14.30: Professional Development Frameworks, Teaching Excellence and Recognition in Irish Universities – Michael Wride, and Mary Fitzpatrick

14.50 Final remarks and close

Please register here

EDIN Workshop and AGM

Sustainable Educational Development with a Focus on Wellbeing

Graduate Attributes Hub, Millstream Courtyard, University of Limerick

EDIN will host a workshop followed by our AGM at University of Limerick from 1030-1430 on Thursday 25th May 2023.

For full details and registration, please use this link.

EDIN published Emerging Issues IV on 26th November 2021.

You can access the full text open access from our website via the main menu or at this link.

We wish to acknowledge warmly the time and hard work of all our authors, reviewers, contributors to events and workshops, and all those who have led to the publication of this book. We hope that it will be useful to colleagues in the EDIN network and across the sector in Ireland and internationally.

EDIN will launch our new book, Emerging Issues IV, on Friday 26th November 2021

This event will also include a keynote from our Guest Speaker Professor Paul Ashwin of Lancaster University.

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/educational-research/people/paul-ashwin

The launch event will be online via Zoom, and the the full text of Emerging Issues IV will be available from this site from 26th November.

PDF versions of chapters or the full book can be downloaded, and an enhanced multimedia publication will also be available here thanks to support from the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Registration is now available at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/edin-launch-of-emerging-issues-iv-and-keynote-speaker-tickets-209674420837

EDIN’s AGM will take place on Thursday 27th May 2021, preceded by a Workshop, Emerging Issues IV: Changing Contexts, from 11am.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Siân Bayne (Professor of Digital Education, University of Edinburgh)

We are delighted to welcome Professor Siân Bayne as our Keynote Speaker (https://sianbayne.net). Siân is Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education, and teaches on Edinburgh’s MSc in Digital Education. She is also Director of Education at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research focuses on higher education futures, interdisciplinary approaches to researching digital education, and digital pedagogy. Many colleagues will have seen her publication of the Manifesto for Teaching Online in 2020, which provided a platform for debate, reflection and inspiration for all of us teaching online, and challenged us to rethink our approaches to using educational technologies. As we progress through what we hope to be the latter stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is timely to think about our changing educational contexts and how we will continue to develop and enhance learning and teaching in our institutions online and on campus.

Registration is via Eventbrite at this link.

As the new academic year starts, a brief reminder that the EDIN Listserv list is available to registered list members to share information and updates.

Please contact us if you are unsure about posting to the list, and for a simple guide to list etiquette.

In 2019, the EDIN Committee agreed, as a collective community of practice, to consider appropriate evaluation tools and metrics to demonstrate the impact of academic development activities. EDIN members were invited to contribute to a two-part workshop in order to (i) to discuss and define impact in the context of our work as academic developers, and (ii) to identify how we could demonstrate the impact of our activities.

We are delighted to announce the availability of the online EDIN Impact Analysis Tool, an easy to use, step-by-step, online tool that allows you to plan, evaluate or think more generally about the impact of an educational development activity. It includes a series of curated articles/resources to allow deeper exploration of topics, and at the end you can export your work to a Microsoft Word document. The tool allows you to evaluate both individual activities as well as more general practice through worked examples.

We know that academic developers in Ireland and internationally are increasingly being called upon to demonstrate the impact of their work on their institutions, on academic practice, and most importantly, on students’ learning. Understanding the nature of impact in teaching and learning, and how it occurs, is a key first step in ensuring that resources and efforts invested by those in the higher education community result in positive changes to learning, practice, culture, structures and/or policy (National Forum 2019). We hope that this online resource will help in demonstrating that impact and we look forward to getting your feedback on its benefits and uses.

We would like to acknowledge and thank all EDIN members who have contributed to the development of this resource. We wish also to acknowledge SEDA and Veronica Bamber who have given permission for the tables included in SEDA Special 34 to be adapted for use in this online impact analysis tool.

Introduction

Following on the success of our three previous Emerging Issues publications, EDIN has now called for chapters for Emerging Issues 4 and writing is underway.

Text of Call

Theme and Focus

Previous Emerging Issues publications have not been too prescriptive in relation to themes addressed, and we encourage chapter authors to focus on topics important to their practice and likely to be of relevance to others.

2020 has presented unprecedented challenges to everyone working – and learning – in higher education in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have heard much discussion of changed times and even a ‘new normal’ in our society and within our organisations. We welcome submissions addressing these themes in the context of academic practice and educational development in higher education. However, we also encourage contributors to consider wide-ranging changes in the landscape of higher education:

• The advent of new national initiatives and frameworks for teaching and learning over the past five years;
• Ongoing changes in our student cohorts and new challenges faced by students and staff;
• The growing importance of digital education, learning analytics, open education and open scholarship in higher education;
• Sustainability and the climate emergency;
• Sectoral changes including the new technological universities, institutional mergers and organisational change influencing teaching and learning.

We wish to continue and build on the existing ethos of the Emerging Issues publications too, sharing experience in leading edge developments and sharing knowledge of national and international importance in this area. We wish to provide an opportunity for experienced and new voices to contribute to the professional learning and knowledge of academic developers. Emerging Issues publications have used a collaborative writing model with a range of supports which we envisage will continue with this publication. Most importantly, we seek to influence positively the practice of our colleagues through insights, evidence and reflection on our work, prompting renewed conversation and new working relationships in this area.

Contributions will be chosen because they reflect both the theme and the aims of the publication; your final contribution to the book should equally reflect these themes and aims. Writing will be supported through workshops. Chapters will be peer-reviewed with peers drawn from the sector in Ireland and the UK.

Audience

The audience for this book, as for the previous Emerging Issues publications, is wide.  It will include, amongst others, higher education teaching staff, staff involved in supporting teaching and learning, library staff, higher education senior management, policy makers, students and, in particular, educational developers inclusive of e-learning specialists, in both Ireland and elsewhere.  In writing your chapter, please be aware of the diversity of the audience and the fact that, though the majority of your readers will be from Ireland, your contribution should be accessible to an international audience.

Publication Timelines – Updated 13th August 2020

Publication

Following the model of previous Emerging Issues publications, Emerging Issues 4 will be an open publication with chapters released under Creative Commons licensing.

Style guidelines

Comprehensive details with regards chapter style will be forwarded at a later stage in the process; for now, the following points on style, which have been adapted from the Taylor & Francis ‘Advice to authors on preparing a manuscript’, should be noted by all authors:

EDIN’s AGM will take place online on 29th May 2020. Ahead of the AGM we are throwing open the #EDINIrlChallenge and invite all our members to take part.

What is the EDIN Challenge?

Unfortunately, EDIN cannot run its normal AGM this year, nor could we run any events in spring. We don’t have the usual opportunity for members to gather, reconnect and chat, or invite a guest speaker to stimulate our thinking for next year.

We know how challenging the semester has been and that EDIN members have been working many long hours to continue delivering their commitments, and at the same time support our colleagues across the disciplines with the ‘pivot’ online and rapid change to alternative assessments. To celebrate the work of academic developers we are launching an online ‘challenge’ for the two weeks leading into the AGM, to provide some peer support, reconnection, and perhaps some temporary diversion from our day-to-day obligations.

The pandemic has meant new recognition for and visibility of educational developers, instructional designers, e-learning specialists, and learning support professionals in our sector. But sometimes we have still needed to explain our work. And those people outside work in our home lives might be very puzzled about why we are so busy when our offices are closed.

So the challenge is to come up with a photo, drawing, ‘shelfie’ (your bookshelf) with a comment, or aphorism that reflects your work.

If you use Twitter or Instagram, you can post your selection with the hashtag #EDINIrlChallenge. If you are not using social media, you can email it [edinnetwork at gmail.com] with your consent for us to post it via EDIN’s Twitter account. We will share a sample of postings at the AGM.

The aim is to communicate the very positive contribution we are all making at this time to help members reconnect and know that we are all working together to enable teaching, learning and assessment to continue in our organisations.