Co-ordinated by:
Fiona Fouhy, Biological Sciences, MTU Cork campuses
Email: Fiona.Fouhy@mtu.ie
Summary:
- We began the LC with just 6 members and we have grown to 14 active members.
- We meet every two weeks and have a 30 min meeting.
- These have included an initial meet and greet meeting to get to know the diverse staff teaching on this new programme (from over 10 different departments).
- We had a presentation from our resident Home Economist to explain the role of Home Economists beyond teachers so that we could incorporate this information into our teaching. We feel it is important that we dont focus on the students becoming teachers and instead include diverse examples of where their skills can be applied after graduating. This will empower the students.
- We established a MS Teams channel and shared recordings of meetings, resources and information with each other here.
- We identified the need for closer engagement between all staff and students and organised an event to celebrate World Home Economics Day on March 21st. We invited Maria Young from the local community garden to speak to the students and the students have since developed strong links with the community garden and will use some space to grow veg, herbs etc. and use in their coursework. The event gave us the opportunity to meet in an informal manner with the 32 students and with the staff on the course and it was a great event. It also gave us the opportunity to promote the new course and a press release was shared on the day. On the day we also gave 3 student prizes for the best questions for Maria Young. This was a wonderful way to reward students for their engagement and really helped to reward their enthusiasm for the event.
- We have also used the LC to identify if there were areas to improve the teaching, learning and assessment for our programme. We have identified the need to highlight to students the overlap/synergies between the modules. To do this we will share resources between staff so we can see how the modules link and ensure a more cohesive approach to the delivery of all modules.
- We have also used the LC meetings to examine student feedback from both semesters and to identify areas to improve.
- We also used the LC to look at the assessment matrix provided to students and looked at the students feedback on this. This proved very successful and is something many said we should include in other programmes.
- We have reviewed the first year of the programme in our LC with all teaching staff having the opportunity to identify gaps, areas to improve and to discuss how we can learn from each other's experience of this year and improve things even more for next year.
- The learning community has provided us with a friendly, welcoming space to meet and discuss our teaching, assessment, and feedback and to learn from each other. It also enables us to take our learnings and to improve the delivery of the programme. We have been very grateful to have this community this year with this being the first year of this programme and we hope to grow and flourish in the coming years.