November 6, 2009, by Teaching at Nottingham

Sharing resources on modules taught across campuses

Video >>
Chris Barnatt: “Initially we were coming at things from a very different perspective because the people teaching the module on the other campuses are native from Malaysia or China themselves and therefore they’ve come from a different education system and although they’ve got the same materials and even if you’ve got exactly the same things to work from you can teach it in a very different way. And it’s getting the students to perform right at the top end in what we would think is a HE environment that is… that’s a tricky balance I think you learn that with time.”

Martin Binks: “So the first time we ran it, there was nobody around who really knew enough about entrepreneurship in terms of the background to give the initial lectures. So I had to podcast all of the lectures to start with, and they then… and I sent then with all the slides and everything, and they didn’t video it. They just had my voice, and the students had the handouts, and they went in sort of fifteen minute clips. And then they’d have an academic or one or more academics in there who could then respond to students when they’d stop the podcast. If they had questions, they could then discuss those with them. By the following year the academic concerned was much more confident and felt that’s fine. In fact they said ‘Actually, I can do this better because I’m…’ Again, they’ve got the tacit knowledge of what’s going on in China or Malaysia with the students and their backgrounds and everything else. So they were more effective than I would be as a remote voice being transmitted across.”

Chris Barnatt: “I’ve found that using things like video and using things like Podcasts means you can have some consistency because they can have the same materials available. I’ve started running tutorials where we don’t base them around actual articles but we base them around YouTube videos and therefore you can show those playlists between the campuses and students will comment between the campuses. So there are ways of starting to use, I suppose new learning side of things to give it the same type of experience and yet you’re in a completely different place, teaching a different module. I’ve even had students come back to me who’ve been in Malaysia say for their second year, who’ve taken my module in Malaysia, which of course I didn’t teach them at all and they go ‘oh I enjoyed your module’, you go, ‘hang on you weren’t here when you took my module’, but they go ‘well we listen to your Podcast’ and you know. So it’s, it is possible to put it together but I guess the overall message is you have to plan a lot more if you’ve got a module running in two or three parts of the world,

“I think particularly in this school we’ll see more and more electronic work being done. We’re starting to use Xerte resource from the learning team to actually develop resources we can share between campuses where students will have certain materials which are electronically created between the whole module team but they’ll still have their module outlines and things from the home campus as it were.

“We tend to have more informal communication so the people who are teaching the same module aren’t teaching in the UK, in Malaysia and China, we tend to exchange materials. It does tend, I have to admit at the moment to be more, I will send out what we’re doing in Nottingham and they tend to adapt to that. But we also are starting to get ideas going in both directions.”

Christopher Barnatt, Martin Binks (Nottingham University Business School)

Extracts from interviews with staff and students about experiences of internationalisation. This video was originally published as part of PESL’s Learning from internationalisation collection. Produced November 2009.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn