Changing academic practice at a UK research-intensive university through supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL)

Over the past decade, there have been many changes in Higher Education in the UK. Alongside increased student participation and widening access, the government has called for universities to professionally develop teachers in Higher Education and recognise the role of learning and teaching in the sector. The University of Glasgow has responded to this changing agenda in a number of ways. At the institutional level, the University launched its first comprehensive Learning and Teaching Strategy in 2006. At the same time it also appointed Associate Deans of Learning and Teaching in each Faculty. Another initiative has been the introduction of a ‘teaching’ career track, through the establishment of a new category of academic staff, the University Teacher, with promotion procedures supporting career development up to Professorial level. Rather than engaging in research (one of the main academic roles of the lecturer, associate professor in US terms), University Teachers must engage in scholarship, in addition to their teaching and administration duties. The establishment of a Learning and Teaching Centre responsible for supporting the University in the implementation of its Learning and Teaching Strategy has also consolidated and initiated a number of activities that all aim to enhance the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Glasgow. These initiatives have wrought changes at an institutional level and are contributing to changing academic practice. In particular, the term ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’, once unheard of at the institution is increasingly being recognised as a valid form of academic activity and increasing numbers of academic staff are engaging in it. This paper will outline some of these changes and offer reflections on their impact on SoTL and academic practice

Performative regulation: a case study in how powerful people avoid criminal labels

This paper explores the role of invested powerful business actors in the criminalisation process as applied to the illicit antiquities market. We present a case study of the precise mechanics of the role played by trade interests in the formation of the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003. This process involved the trade’s entering appearance in the legislative process and neutralising the possible constraining effects on its members of the new criminal offence which was to be created. We begin by exploring the political, historical and economic context in which discussion of the terms of the 2003 Act first began. We then follow the Act from its genesis through its various stages of drafting and re-drafting, to its enactment. This case study of a single piece of legislation provides further data to add to the line of prior research that illustrates that powerful white-collar criminals, as well as sometimes preventing criminal legislation entering the statute books, can also influence the design of criminal legislation that does enter the statute books in order to protect themselves and their own business interests. We also use this case study of a process of contemporary law-making to outline the concept of performative regulation: broadly, that which in appearance serves political ends but in practice effects an inconsequential level of control

A comprehensive study of the usability of multiple graphical passwords

Recognition-based graphical authentication systems (RBGSs) using images as passwords have been proposed as one potential solution to the need for more usable authentication. The rapid increase in the technologies requiring user authentication has increased the number of passwords that users have to remember. But nearly all prior work with RBGSs has studied the usability of a single password. In this paper, we present the first published comparison of the usability of multiple graphical passwords with four different image types: Mikon, doodle, art and everyday objects (food, buildings, sports etc.). A longi-tudinal experiment was performed with 100 participants over a period of 8 weeks, to examine the usability performance of each of the image types. The re-sults of the study demonstrate that object images are most usable in the sense of being more memorable and less time-consuming to employ, Mikon images are close behind but doodle and art images are significantly inferior. The results of our study complement cognitive literature on the picture superiority effect, vis-ual search process and nameability of visually complex images

Progress in QCD Using Lattice Gauge Theory

Review of results from lattice QCD of relevance to standard-model phenomenology, to appear in Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science. KEY WORDS: hadron masses, quark mixing (CKM) matrix, weak matrix elements, strong coupling constant.Comment: 41 pages LaTeX, FERMILAB-PUB-93/058-T. Figures and style file are uuencoded and appended. Figures embedded with epsf.sty, available from the serve

Multicriteria optimization to select images as passwords in recognition based graphical authentication systems

Usability and guessability are two conflicting criteria in assessing the suitability of an image to be used as password in the recognition based graph -ical authentication systems (RGBSs). We present the first work in this area that uses a new approach, which effectively integrates a series of techniques in order to rank images taking into account the values obtained for each of the dimen -sions of usability and guessability, from two user studies. Our approach uses fuzzy numbers to deal with non commensurable criteria and compares two multicriteria optimization methods namely, TOPSIS and VIKOR. The results suggest that VIKOR method is the most applicable to make an objective state-ment about which image type is better suited to be used as password. The paper also discusses some improvements that could be done to improve the ranking assessment

Library Search UX report summer 2016

During Summer 2016, Imperial College London's Library Information Systems team ran a round of user experience research into the information-seeking behaviour of undergraduate and postgraduate students with a specific focus on the use of the library catalogue and discovery interface. The purpose of the work was to understand user behaviours and preferences to target development of practical improvements to the Library Search interface