Abstract:

There is a wealth of good pedagogy being practiced in universities. Teachers are continually trying out new ideas to improve teaching and learning, using novel technologies, creating innovative exercises or assessments, devising new interactive classroom activities, etc. Many of these ideas are never publicised: they are simply developed over time by practicing teachers who have experimented with various activities and found some of them useful. In most cases only the instructor and the participating students know about these activities; knowledge of them does not extend beyond the class in which they are taught. Many lecturers are not interested in undertaking the effort required to write formal articles for publication, are unaware of how their activities may relate to current educational literature, and yet are glad to tell others about what they do in their classes that is ‘different’ from the usual model of teaching – especially if it was their own idea.

There is therefore a vast institutional resource of teaching ideas that are seldom shared. There is potentially much duplication of effort, novel ideas are not being showcased, and individual experiences about what works (and does not work) are not being communicated between people trying out similar activities.

This paper describes an online system which addresses these issues. GUSTTO (GU Teaching Tips Online) has three aims:
• to provide a platform for teachers to showcase their ideas;
• to create a university-wide repository of good practice in a searchable online database, helping the teaching community to explore, discuss, and make use of the teaching practices of others;
• to encourage pedagogical discussion between teachers, building a collegial academic community based on sharing teaching ideas.

In GUSTTO, instructors represent their teaching practice in the form of a ‘teaching tip’ (called a ‘TT’) created using a structured template – an idea based on the concept of ‘bundles’ used for representing good practice in Computing Science teaching (Fincher (1999); Falconer et al., (2011)).

GUSTTO can be distinguished from similar systems is by its three (arguably contentious) principles:
• TTs are descriptions of actual practice – they describe what people actually do. There is no requirement for TTs to be supported by pedagogical research (although this is not excluded).
• There is no moderator – there is no one person (or team) with pedagogical expertise charged with deciding whether a TT can be showcased in the system or not. An institutional repository of teaching practice should be inclusive: if this is what actually happens at the university, it should be shared.
• Contributions and search access is confined to our university only – discussion can therefore take place in an unthreatening environment within a community with a common institutional culture.

By including interaction concepts taken from social media and gaming (league tables, likes, shares, follows), the outcome is a highly interactive and engaging system that supports the spread of good teaching ideas across the university.

References:
[1] Falconer, I., Finlay, J. & Fincher, S. (2011) Representing practice: practice models, patterns, bundles, Learning, Media and Technology, 36(2), 101-127.
[2] Fincher, S. (1999) Analysis of Design: An Exploration of Patterns and Pattern Languages for Pedagogy. Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching, 18(3), 331-348.

Keywords:

Learning communities, best practice, learning technology.