QUASAR Group makes major contribution to 2013 Learning and Teaching conference
Higher education has changed dramatically over the past ten years with advances in technology, the changing expectations of students, growing diversity and the increasing variety of higher education institutions. The annual Higher Education Academy Learning and Teaching conference aims to disseminate evidence based, effective practice and to examine how this impacts on STEM disciplines. This year this important event took place in Birmingham, UK on 17/18 April and brought together experts from across the UK to promote knowledge exchange and discussion.
Prof. Welsch contributed two talks to this year’s conference, both based on the successful training concepts developed within the DITANET, oPAC and LA³NET projects. On Wednesday, he spoke about ‘Employability in Europe: Enhancing Post Graduate Complementary Skills Training’ and this summary was also accepted as a reviewed paper to the conference. He reflected on the training initially developed for the DITANET Marie Curie fellows and now delivered on an annual basis to chemistry, maths and physics students from Liverpool University and also to the oPAC and LA³NET trainees. After the presentation several other universities showed strong interest in this novel approach and it seems likely that the QUASAR model will be transferred to other higher education institutions in the future.
On Thursday Prof. Welsch talked about ‘Re-Structuring Post Graduate Researcher Training’ and the holistic training concept applied to all research projects within the QUASAR-coordinated ITNs. Intense discussion took place throughout the two days and a lot of encouraging feedback on the Group’s training concepts was received.