Teaching@Sydney is a blog, website, newsletter and place for staff and students to contribute and share anything related to teaching and learning at Sydney. This platform has a long history that began in 1996 in the form of the print publication Synergy, where staff from around the University wrote about learning and teaching innovations. In 2009, we moved online, with articles shared monthly via an email newsletter. By 2016, the readership had grown to over 3,800. In support of the new education strategy’s drive to develop a culture that values and promotes outstanding teaching, August 2016 saw the launch of Teaching@Sydney in its current interactive and collaborative format.
What’s in Teaching@Sydney?
Posts on Teaching@Sydney are categorised by Faculties, as well as by a number of sections:
- Sydney updates – University-wide learning and teaching updates such as those relating to tools, learning spaces or policy
- News and events – University-wide workshops, conferences, talks, announcements, updates on grants and awards
- Teaching tips – Innovative tools, examples or guidelines for teaching, learning and assessment
- Educational excellence – Interviews, showcases of grant and award winners, stories about educational success or innovative works in progress
- Teaching research – Reviews, conference updates, research findings, theory
Contributors
We invite staff and students from across the University to write and share anything related to learning and teaching at Sydney. The site allows you to share and view teaching tips, examples of educational excellence, news and updates, and teaching research. You can contribute your post to your Faculty’s dedicated category, and also to other broader sections (e.g. Teaching Tips) that target a wider University readership. Potential stories might include examples of innovative teaching, an encouraging story of student engagement, an exciting learning and teaching project, an impactful tool or approach, or news about a recent grant, publication or award.
If you have a University of Sydney unikey, you can find out more about how to contribute, or just Contribute a post
Editors
Teaching@Sydney is edited by a small group from the Educational Innovation team within the DVC (Education) Portfolio.
Jess Frawley is a senior lecturer in the Educational Innovation team and an Honorary Associate in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. She has a multidisciplinary background spanning Arts, Social Sciences and Information Technology. Her research sits at the nexus of fields such as semiotics, human-computer interaction, information systems and education. Her primary area of specialisation is on understanding people’s lived experience with new and emerging technologies and using such understandings to inform future technology design and use. This perspective has underpinned Jessica’s research in several applied research settings. This has included higher education development and informal community-based learning. One of the threads that runs through her research is interest in user- and student-generated content and the new multimodal literacies that typically accompany these practices.
Alix Thoeming is an educational design manager in the Educational Innovation team. A theoretical archaeologist by training but teaching die-hard, she has taught across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and in 2021 was responsible for the design, delivery, coordination, and teaching of the new core Bachelor of Arts unit FASS1000 Studying Arts and Social Sciences. Alix’s professional interests include first-year transition and teaching, early-career teaching development, strengths-based pedagogies, and the use of educational technologies to enable and support both students and teachers.
Samantha Clarke is a senior lecturer in the Educational Innovation team and an Honorary Associate in the School of Geosciences. She is a marine geologist and academic developer, passionate about learning and teaching. Following her love of learning, Sam has a strong background in student engagement, student transition, diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), and technology-enhanced learning, and has won international, national, and university teaching awards in the field of learning and teaching.
Danny Liu is an associate professor in the Educational Innovation team. A molecular biologist by training, programmer by night, researcher and academic developer by day, and educator at heart, he has coordinated, taught, mentored staff in, and redeveloped a number of large units, and has won a few national awards for this. Danny’s professional and research interests are around learning analytics and educational data mining, student engagement, infusing technology in learning & teaching, the first year experience, and really anything where students are the focus.
We wish to thank James Tracy for lending his substantial technical expertise to the design and development of this platform.