Impact of the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) Phase 4

Impact of the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) Phase 4:

Summary of Discipline-based Reviews

Dr Helen King FSEDA NTF, January 2007

Contents

Executive Summary

Introduction

The FDTL4 Programme

Impact Study Approach

Good Practice Development

Dissemination for Awareness and Understanding

Embedding of Good Learning and Teaching Practice

Overall Impact of FDTL Phase 4 Projects

Impact on individuals

Impact on Departments / Institutions

Impact on the Disciplines

Impact on Students

Impact on Other Relevant Stakeholders Nationally and Internationally

Key Opportunities and Challenges

Opportunities

Challenges

Longer-term Sustainability

Conclusion

Appendix A: Projects and HEIs

FDTL4 Projects by Discipline Area

List of Lead and Partner Institutions

Appendix B: Subject Centre Discipline-based Impact Review Methodologies

Art, Design and Media

Bioscience

Health Sciences and Practice

Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research

Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine

Physical Sciences

Psychology

Executive Summary

A total of 38 projects were funded under FDTL Phase 4 and funding began in October 2002. Over 50 higher education institutions (HEIs) in England and Northern Ireland were directly involved in the programme as project leaders or partners.This report on the impact of FDTL4 provides a summary of the discipline-based impact reviews conducted by the seven relevant HE Academy Subject Centres in 2006 (the number of projects in each subject area is given in parentheses):

Art, Design and Media (3)
Bioscience (6)
Health Sciences and Practice (11)
Mathematics, Statistics and OR (3)
Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine (6)
Physical Sciences (3)
Psychology (6)

The evidence provided in the Subject Centre reviews offers a broad range of qualitative (and, to some extent, quantitative) data that clearly demonstrates the positive impact of the FDTL4 programme.

Good Practice Development

The good practice developed and disseminated through FDTL4 was done so in the form of products (paper-based, web-based and face-to-face activities) targeted towards two primary audiences:

students (such as study guides and learning tools) and
academic staff (such as exemplar teaching methodologies, assessment tools, resource libraries, staff development materials and events).

Some projects developed their resources from scratch with the intention of filling an identified ‘gap in the market’, whilst others built on existing good practice seeking to evaluate and disseminate it further. All the projects reported on in the Subject Centres’ reviews produced most, if not all, their intended deliverables. Indeed many projects exceeded their original plans.

e.g. from Health Sciences & Practice
The production of materials was a very tangible outcome for the four resource-based projects. Partner and stakeholder respondents commented on the extremely high quality of many of the resources produced:
“we set out to [create a resource] to help staff and the students, and really that’s what we’ve done. And they’re actually being used. So I think that’s the main impact”.

Dissemination for Awareness and Understanding

The Subject Centre overview reports clearly indicate that one of the key impacts of the FDTL4 programme is an enhanced awareness and understanding of relevant issues by various stakeholders in learning and teaching in the disciplines.This dissemination was conducted with a wide range of media and audiences including presentations / workshops at local, national and international meetings and conferences; newsletters, leaflets, journal articles, case studies, guides and books; staff development seminars and workshops; websites; and CDs and DVDs. The relevant Subject Centre(s) was found to be a useful dissemination partner for many of the projects.

e.g. from Art, Design & Media
WritingPAD presented papers at significant national and international conferences…[and produced] a number of publications in conference books and research journals. At Goldsmiths and the RCA, WritingPAD organised weekly workshops, Drawing on Writing, for both staff and students. Staff development seminars were run at both the RCA and CSM.

Embedding of Good Practice

The embedding of the good learning and teaching practice, both within their own institutions and more widely, was also an important aspect of the vast majority of projects in the FDTL4 programme. The Subject Centre reviews suggested that there were three main characteristics of successful embedding strategies: involving stakeholders from the outset, timeliness and credibility.

e.g. from Psychology
Observation Skills In Psychology: Project outcomes have been embedded into teaching programmes in a variety of institutions. At the time of writing the Observation Skills software has been requested in over 40 institutions. Although the extent of usage in each of these institutions is not known there are indications that the software is becoming embedded in practice, for example “the Leeds programme was an early adopter of the materials produced by this project, and a session built around them have formed part of the introductory block for two years running”. A total of 17 institutions participated in the various evaluation phases with feedback gathered from academics, students, trainees and technical support staff.
Development And Evaluation Of PBL In Clinical Psychology Training Programmes: Four training programmes have incorporated PBL into their curricula with a further two programmes committed to incorporating PBL into their curriculum in 2006. Their report estimates “that around 50% of clinical training programmes in the country have, or are planning to, implement some aspects of PBL into their training”.

Impact on Individuals, Departments and Institutions

Many projects noted the impact that being involved had had on individual team members and key stakeholders. This impact was not insignificant and affected a huge number of individuals in many ways. The impact on departments and institutions, beyond the project team, was often dependent on the enthusiasm and hard work of the project leader / manager acting as a ‘champion’, together with commitment from senior management. This local commitment to the projects then led to a much wider impact involving a large number of other individuals and departments. In some cases, the projects made a major impact on their institutions through curriculum change and, most significantly, contributions to successful bids for Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs).

e.g. from Bioscience
Perhaps one unforeseen outcome of the project was the impact on the participants themselves. One co-investigator pointed out that the enormous help from Birkbeck had meant that he could develop his understanding of on-line assessment and its challenges (without himself having to learn a new software) and that the project had inspired him to undertake further professional development in this area.
One distinct success of the [PROFILE] team is in receiving institutional approval for awarding academic credit for work-based learning across all programmes.

Impact on the Disciplines

The discipline-based focus of the projects is a very positive feature of the FDTL programme. Projects were able to make the most of existing communities of practice in order to involve stakeholders in their activities. Collaborative activities were easier to instigate when the project team were already engaged with potential partners and then cross-disciplinary collaboration was more effective once the project had established itself within one subject area.

e.g. from Medicine, Dentistry & Veterinary Medicine
“We worked just in medical education for the project although we planned at first to try other professional groups such as pharmacy. It was really good to focus on one subject, we know it well and have an expertise and everyone who came to the workshops had a common understanding of the issues and context”
“We hit the ground running much more quickly than if we had to develop a shared understanding of others ways of working”
Many of the projects aim to work across disciplines, sometimes across medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine and one project involves all health professions as well as social work.
“It was really helpful to be able to draw from medicine for our project as it had credibility whilst being different enough in the specifics of the assessments but now things are going the other way and we are working with the medics to show what we have developed in terms of innovations, I suppose it is the value in sharing good practice and developing cross professional networks”

Impact on Students

Although not explicitly mentioned in the aims of FDTL, students are essentially the ‘end users’ of good learning and teaching practice and hence, impact on students is a good measure of the success of the funding programme. Such impact is, however, extremely hard to evaluate directly not least because it is often difficult to establish a casual relationship between the projects’s work and enhanced student learning. Nevertheless a considerable amount of evidence was provided through the Subject Centre reviews of the impact on students.

e.g. from Physical Sciences
The PPLATO resources were considered valuable by those students who used them;

The resources also appeared to increase students’ confidence in mathematical topics;
Some students reported that they would use the resource later in their studies e.g. in preparation for an examination or when they met a topic that they did not understand.
Students appeared to value the guidance provided in working through the resources.

LeAP:“Students who may not shine in a traditional physics exercise can find they have a lot to offer in PBL. I noticed too that the hours spent on coursework (as recorded by the students) increased and this certainly reflected the increased challenge of the problem but also their cussed determination to finish it. Perhaps this shows if you can engage students in something like the way a role-playing game does, you may get similar levels of concentration directed at your physics problem.”

Impact on Other Stakeholders National and Internationally

Many, if not all, subject areas in higher education have links with employers, professional bodies and other organisations. Many projects, therefore, had considerable impact beyond higher education institutions in England and Northern Ireland. This was also true of the wider UK and international dimension. Although some projects were hesitant to work outside the funding bodies’ remit, those that did saw this as a positive impact of their work which did not detract from their main target audience.

e.g. from Mathematics, Statistics & OR
Although mathtutor may have been developed with the lone learner in mind, its documented use by students and staff within the classroom go far beyond individual study. There is evidence that mathtutor is also being widely used within the school environment.
The international dimension of the [HELM] Project is emphasised by requests to use the resources being received from institutions within Australia, Malaysia, Jamaica, and the Philippines. In addition, contact has been received from students in Denmark, Egypt, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and the USA.

Opportunities and Challenges

All the projects were set up in order to support learning and teaching developments in areas of need in the disciplines. Some projects also explicitly linked their work to current national agendas taking the opportunity to use the ‘hot topic’ as a means to better ensure buy-in from their communities. Opportunities for development of the projects also arose during their lifetime. Several projects came up against a variety of challenges but, in most cases, these were overcome and did not adversely affect the quality of the final outcomes. These challenges included project management, personnel, time and resources issues; discipline-based or institutional resistance; and changes in the external environment.

Longer-term Sustainability of Outcomes

The Subject Centre reviews indicate that the FDTL4 programme has had a considerable impact during its lifetime. Some reviews suggested that additional, evaluation funding would be useful in a few years time to identify longer-term impacts. However, mostly it was the longer-term sustainability of the outcomes and resources that concerned many of the projects and the HE Academy was cited as one possible source of continuation support. Despite these concerns, many projects have found ways to extend their work, not least through involvement with bigger initiatives such as the CETLs.

Dr Helen King

5th January 2007

Introduction

The FDTL4 Programme

The Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) was established in 1995 to support projects aimed at stimulating developments in teaching and learning in higher education and to encourage the dissemination of good teaching and learning practice across the higher education sector. FDTL is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Department for Employment and Learning (DEL).

A total of 38 projects were funded under FDTL Phase 4 and funding began in October 2002. Over 50 higher education institutions (HEIs) in England and Northern Ireland were directly involved in the programme as project leaders or partners.FDTL funding is directed at institutions that have received recognition for the quality of their educational provision through the Quality Assurance Agency subject/institutional reviews. The fourth phase of funding was linked to those subjects that had recently been reviewed by the QAA and to key areas of interest in those subjects e.g. assessment, feedback, work-based learning. Projects were funded within the following subjectareas (a full list of projects and institutions can be found in Appendix A):

Anatomy and Physiology
Art and Design
Dentistry
Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research
Medicine
Molecular Biosciences

Nursing
Organismal Biosciences
Other subjects allied to medicine
Pharmacology and Pharmacy
Physics and Astronomy
Psychology
Veterinary Medicine

Impact Study Approach

This report on the impact of FDTL4 provides a summary of the discipline-based impact reviews conducted by the seven relevant HE Academy Subject Centres in 2006 (the number of projects in each subject area is given in parentheses):

Art, Design andMedia (3)
Bioscience (6)
Health Sciences and Practice (11)
Mathematics, Statistics and OR (3)
Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine (6)
Physical Sciences (3)
Psychology (6)

No specific guidelines were provided to the Subject Centres regarding the format of the reviews and, hence, each adopted a different approach depending on their available resources and the number of projects in their discipline area (see methodologies in Appendix B).

This summary provides a general overview of 32 of the 38 funded projects. Of the 6 projects not included: 1 project is in Medicine (according to the review, no data could be found nor project partners contacted), 1 in Physical Science (one project listed on the FDTL website is not mentioned in the Subject Centre’s review) and 4 in Health Sciences & Practice (according to the reviewer, the project leaders declined or failed to respond to their request to participate in the review).

The Subject Centres provided specific impact information for each of their relevant FDTL4 projects with the exception of Medicine, Dentistry & Veterinary Medicine and Health Sciences & Practice who provided anonymous overviews for the projects within their subject areas.The project names are provided, where possible, in this report; otherwise,examples and quotations are referenced by subject area only.Each Subject Centre review included different numbers of projects, levels of detail and areas of focus.Therefore, the ‘snapshot’ examples provided in the body of this document have been offeredto illustrate aspects of the FDTL4 programme as a whole; comparisons between subject areas have not been (and should not be) made.

The FDTL 4 Project Manager’s Handbook states in its introduction that “The primary focus of FDTL4 is to develop, disseminate and embed good practice in learning and teaching throughout the higher education sector.” ( summary report seeks to demonstrate the impact of the FDTL4 programme, in these terms, on the higher education community in England and Northern Ireland, including the individuals directly involved in the project, their departments, disciplines, students and other relevant stakeholders nationally and further afield. In addition, this report will discuss the key challenges and opportunities faced by the projects in achieving this impact during their lifetime and in the longer-term.

Good Practice Development

The ‘good practice’ developed and disseminated through FDTL4 was done so in the form of products (paper-based, web-based and face-to-face) targeted towards two primary stakeholders:

students (such as study guides and learning tools) and
academic staff (such as exemplar teaching methodologies, assessment tools, resource libraries and staff development materials and events).

All the projects reported on in the Subject Centres’ reviews produced most, if not all, their intended deliverables. Indeed many projects exceeded their original plans as this example from the Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine (MeDeV) Subject Centre illustrates:

All projects delivered outputs that were over and above the specified deliverables indicating the ‘value added’ achieved by these projects. Additional deliverables included:

case study reports
additional research activities (evaluation studies, literature reviews, action research activities)
research findings presented at conferences
a monograph
a open access website with a catalogue of resources about the project topic
templates for producing assessment questions
accredited postgraduate certificate programmes
a staff infrastructure
a community of practice
staff training and development (formal and informal)

Only two projects (both in Bioscience) did not fulfil their intended objectives, however, in both cases, this was due to unforeseen circumstances and the outcomes achieved were considered admirable given the situation: