Good practice guide in learning and teaching

This is the second edition of our Aston Business School (ABS) Good Practice Guide and the enthusiasm of the contributors appears undiminished. I am again reminded that I work with a group of very committed, dedicated and professional colleagues. Once again this publication is produced to celebrate and promote good teaching across the School and to offer encouragement to those imaginative and innovative staff who continue to wish to challenge students to learn to maximum effect. It is hoped that others will pick up some good ideas from the articles contained in this volume. Contributors to this Guide were not chosen because they are the best teachers in the School, although they are undoubtedly all amongst my colleagues who are exponents of enthusiastic and inspiring approaches to learning. The Quality Unit approached these individuals because they declared on their Annual Module Reflection Forms that they were doing something interesting and worthwhile which they thought others might find useful. Amongst those reading the Guide I am sure that there are many other individuals who are trying to operate similar examples of good practice in their teaching, learning and assessment methods. I hope that this publication will provoke these people into providing comments and articles of their own and that these will form the basis of next year’s Guide. It may also provoke some people to try these methods in their own teaching. The themes of the articles this year can be divided into two groups. The first theme is the quest to help students to help themselves to learn via student-run tutorials, surprise tests and mock examinations linked with individual tutorials. The second theme is making learning come to life in exciting practical ways by, for example, hands-on workshops and simulations, story telling, rhetorical questioning and discussion groups. A common theme is one of enthusiasm, reflection and commitment on behalf of the lecturers concerned. None of the approaches discussed in this publication are low effort activities on the part of the facilitator, but this effort is regarded as worthwhile as a means of creating greater student engagement. As Biggs (2003)[1] says, in his similarly inspiring way, students learn more the less passive they are in their learning. (Ref). The articles in this publication bear witness of this and much more. Since last year Aston Business School has launched its Research Centre in Higher Education Learning and Management (HELM) which is another initiative to promote excellent learning and teaching. Even before this institution has become fully operational, at least one of the articles in this publication has seen the light of day in the research arena and at least two others are ripe for dissemination to a wider audience via journal publication. More news of our successes in this activity will appear in next year’s edition. May I thank the contributors for taking time out of their busy schedules to write the articles this summer, and to Julie Green who runs the ABS Quality Unit, for putting our diverse approaches into a coherent and publishable form and for chasing us when we have needed it! I would also like to thank Ann Morton and her colleagues in the Centre for Staff Development who have supported this publication. During the last year the Centre has further stimulated the learning and teaching life of the School (and the wider University) via their Learning and Teaching Week and sponsorship of Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (TQEF) projects. Pedagogic excellence is in better health at Aston than ever before – long may this be because this is what life in HE should be about.

Learner initiative in the language classroom

This article looks at learner initiative in teacher-fronted activities and how this can influence classroom interaction. Extracts from lesson transcripts of adult evening classes in Italy are used to give a precise definition of what is meant by learner initiative and to illustrate how it can change interaction patterns. It is suggested that learner initiative could have an important role to play in promoting comprehensible input and output and therefore language learning. It will be seen how, by giving learners more space and time, initiative can be actively encouraged. However, there are direct implications for teacher training as it is necessary to change traditional interaction patterns and make learner initiative more effective.

The virtual pedagogy initiative

Contemporary Higher Education Institutions must adapt to address government funded calls for expansion and widened participation. The adoption of e-learning strategies, such as the use of the podcasts, can facilitate flexible learning around the needs and expectations of students. In this article we outline a number of e-learning developments at Aston University collectively referred to as the Virtual Pedagogy Initiative. Each of the strands, podcasts, vodcasts, mobile telephony and the campus wide remote broadcasts, are described pedagogically as well as technically. Where possible data highlighting the student response and experience are included. The article begins with the contention that contemporary undergraduates may be qualitatively different and can considered „digital natives?.

Developing a framework to evaluate business networks:the case of Ireland's industry-led network initiative

Business networks have been described as cooperative arrangements between independent business organisations that vary from contractual joint ventures to informal exchanges of information. This collaboration has become recognised as an innovative and efficient tool for organising interdependent activities, with benefits accruing to both firms and the local economy. For a number of years, resources have been devoted to supporting Irish networking policies. One recent example of such support is the Irish government's target of €20 million per annum for five years to support the creation of enterprise-led networks. It is imperative that a clear rationale for such interventions is established, as the opportunity cost of public funds is high. This article, therefore, develops an evaluation framework for such networking interventions. This framework will facilitate effective programme planning, implementation and evaluation. It will potentially show how a chain of cause-and-effect at both micro and macro-levels for networking interventions can be established.

Employment outcomes and plant closure in a post-industrial city:an analysis of the labour market studies of MG Rover workers three years on

This paper examines how the loss of 6300 jobs from the closure of MG Rover (MGR) in the city of Birmingham (UK) in April 2005 affected the employment trajectories of ex-workers, in the context of wider structural change and efforts at urban renewal. The paper presents an analysis of a longitudinal survey of 300 ex-MGR workers, and examines to what extent the state of local labour markets and workers’ geographical mobility—as well as the effectiveness of the immediate policy response and longer-term local economic strategies—may have helped to balance the impacts of personal attributes associated with workers’ employability and their reabsorption into the labour markets. It is found that the relative buoyancy of the local economy, the success of longer-run efforts at diversification and a strong policy response and retraining initiative helped many disadvantaged workers to find new jobs in the medium term. However, the paper also highlights the unequal employment outcomes and trajectories that many lesser-skilled workers faced. It explores the policy issues arising from such closures and their aftermath, such as the need to co-ordinate responses, to retain institutional capacity, to offer high-quality training and education resources to workers and, where possible, to slow down such closure processes to enable skills to be retained and reused within the local economy.

Summary of the 10th International workshop on Models@run.time

The 10th anniversary of the workshop Models@run.time was held at the 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. The workshop took place in the city of Ottawa, Canada, on the 29th of September 2015. The workshop was organized by Sebastian Gtz, Nelly Bencomo, Gordon Blair and Hui Song. Here, we present a summary of the discussions at the workshop and a synopsis of the topics discussed and highlighted during the workshop. The workshop received the award for the best workshop at the MODELS 2015 conference out of 18 workshops in total. The award was based upon the organization, program, web site timing and the feedback provided by the workshop participants.

Run-time connector synthesis for autonomic systems of systems

A key objective of autonomic computing is to reduce the cost and expertise required for the management of complex IT systems. As a growing number of these systems are implemented as hierarchies or federations of lower-level systems, techniques that support the development of autonomic systems of systems are required. This article introduces one such technique, which involves the run-time synthesis of autonomic system connectors. These connectors are specified by means of a new type of autonomic computing policy termed a resource definition policy, and enable the dynamic realisation of collections of collaborating autonomic systems, as envisaged by the original vision of autonomic computing. We propose a framework for the formal specification of autonomic computing policies, and use it to define the new policy type and to describe its application to the development of autonomic system of systems. To validate the approach, we present a sample data-centre application that was built using connectors synthesised from resource-definition policies.

Speaking out of turn? Taking the initiative in teacher-fronted classroom interaction.

Teacher-fronted interaction is generally seen to place limitations on the contributions that learners can make to classroom discourse and the conclusion is that learners are unable to experiment with, for example, turn-taking mechanisms. This article looks at teacher-fronted interaction in the language classroom from the perspective of learner talk by examining how learners might take the initiative during this apparently more rigid form of interaction. Detailed microanalysis of classroom episodes, using a conversation analysis institutional discourse approach, shows how learners orient to the institutional context to make sophisticated and effective use of turn-taking mechanisms to take the initiative and direct the interaction, even in the controlled environment of teacher-fronted talk. The article describes some of the functions of such learner initiative, examines how learners and teachers co-construct interaction and how learners can create learning opportunities for themselves. It also briefly looks at teacher reactions to such initiative. The article concludes that learner initiative in teacher-fronted interaction may constitute a significant opportunity for learning and that teachers should find ways of encouraging such interaction patterns.

The role of models@run.time in supporting on-the-fly interoperability

Models at runtime can be defined as abstract representations of a system, including its structure and behaviour, which exist in tandem with the given system during the actual execution time of that system. Furthermore, these models should be causally connected to the system being modelled, offering a reflective capability. Significant advances have been made in recent years in applying this concept, most notably in adaptive systems. In this paper we argue that a similar approach can also be used to support the dynamic generation of software artefacts at execution time. An important area where this is relevant is the generation of software mediators to tackle the crucial problem of interoperability in distributed systems. We refer to this approach as emergent middleware, representing a fundamentally new approach to resolving interoperability problems in the complex distributed systems of today. In this context, the runtime models are used to capture meta-information about the underlying networked systems that need to interoperate, including their interfaces and additional knowledge about their associated behaviour. This is supplemented by ontological information to enable semantic reasoning. This paper focuses on this novel use of models at runtime, examining in detail the nature of such runtime models coupled with consideration of the supportive algorithms and tools that extract this knowledge and use it to synthesise the appropriate emergent middleware.