A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Experimental sciences
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• Do resource constraints make any of these unrealistic?
• Can these be made before the next intake of students?
Application of this audit identified 14 areas where improvements could be made.
Some (e.g. circulation to staff and students of details of the employment taken by
graduates over the last three years) were easy to correct. Others (e.g. provision of
work experience placements in areas not involving the discipline) were more
difficult and controversial. The audit was easy to carry out and staff felt the course
was significantly improved by the process.
(Professor Ian Hughes, University of Leeds)
Interrogating practice
Find out the strategy for skills development in your institution and
department.
List the transferable skills development opportunities available in the courses
you teach.
• Are your students aware of these opportunities?
• Are the transferable skills developed reflected within the assessment?
Teaching ethics
The issue of ethics is increasingly prominent, as illustrated by some quotes:
• Supermarket chain annual report: ‘Expect staff to take into account ethical and
sustainability issues when making decisions and choices.’
• Engineering firm: ‘Project management must take ethical and environmental issues
into account.’
• Marketing training video: ‘The PR cost of ethical irresponsibility can be huge and
often unrecoverable’.
Professional organisations also require ethical behaviours in their codes of conduct, and
within the experimental sciences the nature of the disciplines exposes a host of ethical
issues. Graduates need to be able to recognise ethical issues, and be acquainted with the
aspects of constructing an argument based on ethical principles (e.g. autonomy,
beneficence, non-maleficence, fairness and greatest good to largest number).
Assistance on this topic may be available from several of the Centres for Excellence in
Teaching and Learning (CETLs). For example, the IDEA CETL has available a structured