After what seems like an eternity of teams meetings, the academic staff at the School of Economics finally managed to get together for our first “post” pandemic in-person Econ Education Day.
During the day, we reminded ourselves just how much we have managed to achieve for our students in the last two pandemic years: the online provision, the design of alternative delivery plans, and our efforts to support our students’ engagement and nurture our learning communities with the help of our academic societies. We reflected on how best to ensure our curriculum represents the interests of all our students and promotes a better understanding of diversity. We discussed how assessment design can affect learning and motivation, shared practice and exchanged ideas.
As we look forward to our first post pandemic year, we reflected on the importance of an on-campus undergraduate education which nurtures our students’ minds and allows them to feel they belong to an in-person learning community whilst developing key employability skills as well as progressing through their degrees in a supportive environment.
After that, we shared a lunch, we took a photo… simple things we took for granted before and which we now rediscover with renewed wonder.
A couple of weeks later, the National Student Survey results have been published, and more than 82% of our students who took he survey reported being satisfied with our courses. The NSS performance is the combination of everyone’s efforts as conveners, lecturers, seminar leaders, academic advisers, supervisors, academic societies, all the professional roles performed both by professional services and academics, and above all our wonderful learning community of students whose feedback allows us to continue to reflect on and improve our practice. Events like the Education Day ensure that we continue to reflect, to share and to support each other and it is this that enables us to continue to offer the excellent education provision we are all proud of.