Directing the Teaching and Learning Research Programme: or ‘trying to fly a glider made of jelly’

TLRP’s generic phase (1999-2009) is believed to have been the largest ever UK investment in educational research. This paper describes the critique from which TLRP emerged, its strategic positioning and the roles of successive directors and their teams in its development. The paper offers an early stock take of TLRP’s achievements from the perspective of the last Programme Director. The efficacy of the form of the Programme, once likened to ‘a glider made of jelly’, is discussed

Knowledge transformation and impact : aspirations and experiences from TLRP

This paper reviews the intentions and strategies adopted by the UK’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) in its attempts to maximise the impact of its research portfolio. The Programme’s early commitment to user engagement and to an ‘interactive, iterative, constructive, distributed and transformative’ impact strategy is described. The specific outputs and initiatives of the Programme are analysed in relation to three issues - the transformation of findings beyond abstract academic forms; the authentic engagement of users; and the exploitation of ideas which are culturally and politically current. From TLRP experience, it is argued that such work requires significant resources, technology, imagination, expertise and time. The paper concludes with a call for substantial, long-term investment in an appropriate infrastructure to maximise the impact of research in education

Tusnady's inequality revisited

Tusnady's inequality is the key ingredient in the KMT/Hungarian coupling of the empirical distribution function with a Brownian bridge. We present an elementary proof of a result that sharpens the Tusnady inequality, modulo constants. Our method uses the beta integral representation of Binomial tails, simple Taylor expansion and some novel bounds for the ratios of normal tail probabilities.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053604000000733 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Web-based journals in the classroom: motivation and autonomous learning

The use of Web 2.0 in the language classroom is an area of exploration and interest to many. In recent years, much research has looked at the use of blogs in the assistance of language development, and this paper continues in a similar fashion. One key area where this paper adds to the field however, is that it looks at a Web 2.0 portal specifically aimed at language learners; the portal in question is Lang-8, which in conjunction with being similar to a blogging platform, also provides similar functions to a social networking service. This research exposed 12 Korean participants to Lang-8 as part of a credit-bearing university writing course. The participants made weekly journal entries on Lang-8, and upon completion of the course, were given an anonymous online survey to complete. The survey addressed areas relating to online language journals, corrective feedback, motivation, and learner autonomy. Overall, the participants reported that the use of Lang-8 positively affected their motivation levels, had positive experiences through received varied corrective feedback, and were exposed to a portal that allowed for more autonomous learning

Micro-credentials : A postdigital counternarrative

Alternative credentials, such as micro credentials and digital badges, are increasingly being developed in universities. Primarily aimed at employability, these credentials are being scrutinised as it is argued that they are surrounded by ‘great uncertainty’. We contribute to this scrutiny by examining the forms of subjectivity that result from micro-credentials. We argue that, in their current form, they tend to result in a neoliberal subject. Presented is a counter-narrative that examines the current state of micro-credentials and offers an alternative form that refuses instrumentalist logics. In doing so, we draw from Foucault and postdigital research. The result is a recommendation to implement three principles in the design of micro-credentials. The first is the principle of being embedded in the curriculum, the second is alignment with the university mission, and the third is a critical and reflective pedagogy. This recommendation offers further possible subjectivities