Good Practice Guides
Assessment has a powerful effect on student learning. Assessment methods should be selected on the basis of their impact on desired student learning behaviours and outcomes, their feasibility, validity and reliability. Developing effective assessment for your course or program involves several steps, including planning how to assess, writing good quality items, using sound marking practices, and reviewing the assessment data.
Good Practice Guide: Developing Effective Assessment (PDF 277k)
Griffith University uses the term 'blended learning' to describe the use of information and communication technologies to enhance learning and teaching. The defining characteristic of blended learning at Griffith is that ICTs are used to enrich the quality of student learning through interactive learning activities beyond those attainable through face-to-face classroom interactions.
Good Practice Guide: Blended Learning at Griffith (PDF 271k)
Internationalisation is core to the values of Griffith University, which recognises the importance of preparing its students as global citizens. Griffith has adopted a working definition of Internationalisation as 'the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions, or delivery of post secondary education' (Knight, 2003, p. 2-3). The aim is to prepare our students to live and work anywhere in the world by providing them with the skills, expertise and cultural sensitivity to do so. Best practice for internationalisation builds on principles of effective teaching in higher education and is underpinned by a commitment to cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence can be understood as the capacity and orientation to accommodate and adapt to diversity in open, productive and harmonious ways.
Good Practice Guide: Internationalising the Curriculum (PDF 275k)
Gathering and documenting evidence of good teaching practice is a key dimension of academic work. It is important for academics at all stages of their career to document their teaching development and achievements for such purposes as performance review meetings and promotion. Evidence of success in the research domain is determined through such criteria as number of refereed journal articles and amount of external competitive funding. However, evidence of excellence and success in teaching is often more complex to define and document, for teaching in higher education is a multifaceted phenomenon.
Good Practice Guide: Documenting Evidence of Good Teaching Practice (PDF 275k)
Research, and the subsequent creation, validation and dissemination of knowledge, are fundamental to the operation of a research-intensive university. The intention of research-based learning is that university academics make positive moves to help students build strong intellectual and practical connections between research frontiers and the students' own learning.
Student engagement in the first year depends on many pre-entry factors, as well as contextual factors such as student expectations and aspirations, disciplinary context and class size. The following strategies provide a guide for engaging students in the first year. They will be most effective if tailored to your particular context and student cohort.
Good Practice Guide: Enhancing Student Engagement in the First Year (PDF 278k)
Whilst there are many different models of good teaching and many different environments within which students learn, there is one unifying goal - that of enabling students to learn. Your evaluation program should help you to research and document how well, your teaching enables your particular students to learn, in your particular context.
Good Practice Guide: Designing Evaluation for Improving Teaching and Student Learning (PDF 271k)
Work-integrated learning (WIL) is learning that results from an integration of workplace experience and disciplinary knowledge and practice. The phrase work-integrated learning is also used to describe curricula designed to bring about the kind of integrative learning. Integrative learning is learning that integrates the acquisition of disciplinary content and skills with their application in appropriate workplaces through a dialectic process in which the immediate experiences in the workplace are interpreted the lens of codified disciplinary knowledge ins re-interpreted in light of experience.
Good Practice Guide: Work Integrated Learning (WIL) (PDF 271k)
A large class generally includes 100 students or more, but there is no single definition. In some cases, large may signify a class of 50-70 students, in otheres, it may include up to 1500 students in a single cohort. Large classes are most common in the first year of study at university. This carries the added responsibility of supporting first year students through the transition to university, while also introducing them to learning in the university context.
The scholarship of learning and teaching involves research into practices or teaching, learning and curriculum. It involves: asking questions about how your students learn and how best to enhance learning through effective teaching, gathering and interpreting evidence about student learning from a range of sources,sharing the results of your analysis publicly for the purposes of peer review and to share the body of knowledge with colleagues and the academic community.
Good Practice Guide: Scholarship of Learning and Teaching (PDF 336k)
Academic integrity is fundamental to academic life ate University. Academic Integrity means academic honesty and implies that students and teachers abide by a code of honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility (Centre for Academic Integrity, 2000) in relation to the production, publication, assessment and exchange of knowledge in learning, teaching and research.
Good Practice Guide: Issues of Academic Integrity (PDF 281k)
Universities are increasingly being urged to demonstrate their relevance and contribution to finding solutions to pressing social, civic, economic and moral problems. Public scholarship, which had been defined as the engagement of students in authentic and meaningful learning experiences that integrate research, teaching/learning and community engagement (Academic Plan 3), provides a means of responding to this challenge.
Teachers’ own reflections on their work can be a key source of evidence about the effectiveness or otherwise of their teaching, although assistance may be required to identify and analyse what really happens in their teaching practice. Peer Review is a valuable third source of information about teaching. It can work in conjunction with feedback from students and or personal reflection, and has the potential to be both more constructive and more supportive than either of these other sources alone.