“Around the world” podcast
Episode 5: Adina Dudau, University of Glasgow, UK
Welcome to a new edition of the “Educationalist: Around the world” podcast, the last one before the winter holidays! This week I am happy to be joined by Dr. Adina Dudau, Senior Lecturer in management at University of Glasgow Adam Smith Business School.
In 2015, together with two colleagues, she was awarded a grant to turn research methods courses in her school into online courses for on-campus students. This is how her passion for the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching began. Since then, she did a PGCap (Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice) and an MEd in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Her innovative teaching practice features in popular higher education outlets, including Times Higher Education, Academy of Management Learning and Education and Teaching in Public Administration. One of her publications looks specifically at student engagement in eLearning. As an early adopter, Adina has been involved in peer learning over the past 18 months, by creating communities of practice to help diffuse online teaching innovation. You can find Adina on Twitter here.
In this podcast Adina talks about the lessons learned from a pre-pandemic project on online learning, which were very valuable when Covid-19 hit and allowed her and her colleagues to effectively adapt their teaching practices to the new conditions. She finds peer learning one of the most useful ways to exchange and build knowledge on teaching (with and without technology). It was very interesting to hear how she and her colleagues work on creating and maintaining faculty learning communities; her advice is to start talking about teaching in the communities you are already part of and then to cultivate these spaces and encourage an atmosphere of openness and learning. Last but not least, Adina strongly believes in a research-centred, evidence-based teaching practice. In her opinion, this can be achieved by starting to treat teaching like we treat our research, conducting literature reviews to see what knowledge already exists and trying to publish as part of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).
If you would like to hear more, I invite you to listen to our conversation.
You can catch up with our previous stories here:
- A group-based approach to online course design, by Kate Mitchell, University of Melbourne, Australia;
- From solo artists to jazz ensembles: Peer support as a tool for teacher development, by Sanna Eronen, University of Vaasa, Finland;
- Sharing stories and practices of assessment in emergency remote teaching, by Sukaina Walji, University of Cape Town, South Africa;
- Inter-institutional partnerships in faculty development: A crowdsourced list with examples form around the world;
- “Around the world” podcast, episode 1: Jessamyn Neuhaus;
- “Around the world” podcast, episode 2: Online Learning Toolkit (OLT);
- “Around the world” podcast, episode 3: Jo Stroud;
- For real change, we need educational leaders who are CHIC, by Colin Simpson, Monash University, Australia;
- Crossing boundaries: Reflections by a former academic developer, by Tracy Zou, Chinese University of Hong Kong;
- One for all, and all for one: A nationwide vision of inter-institutional faculty development, by Manuel João Costa (University of Minho) and Sandra Soares (University of Aveiro), Portugal;
- “Around the world” podcast, episode 4: Multimedia support for teaching and learning, with Marco Toffanin.
This post is part of the “Around the world” series on faculty development. Watch this space in the coming months for more inspiration on professional development approaches in Higher Education from around the globe.
