Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

by | Feb 1, 2014

Last year I followed the TFP (Teaching Fellowship Preparation) Programme at the Oxford Learning Institute, which I successfully completed by writing a teaching portfolio entitled ’Reflections of Teaching and Learning in Undergraduate and Continuing Education’.

The TFP programme gives an insight into educational theory and the educational literature of higher education research and is recognised by the Hhttp://www.heacademy.ac.uk/igher Education Academy, which is an independent organisation that promotes excellent teaching in higher education and provides resources and recognition for university teachers in the UK, and leads to a fellowship.

I have now received the official certificate that I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

The introduction to my portfolio follows here:


This portfolio builds on my various experiences as a tutor at the University of Oxford and contains reflections on my teaching style and philosophy prompted by insights from the workshops and assignments that formed part of the Teaching Fellowship Preparation (TFP) Programme in Sciences and from my reading of some of the literature on teaching in higher education. The portfolio includes elements of the undergraduate teaching within the university including my own tutorials (Chapter 1), peer observations of a lecture (Chapter 2) and a comparison of the teaching of animal behaviour between the universities of Oxford and St. Andrews (Chapter 3). However, in addition I reflect on the slightly different teaching style required for teaching accredited weekly classes to the general public in the context of continuing education (Chapter 1 and 4) and I compare the face-to-face and online learning based on the available literature and my own experiences in writing and teaching an online module in statistics (Chapter 1 and 2). Finally I use the information on course design gained throughout the TFP programme in general and the importance of learning outcomes and constructive alignment (Chapter 3) in particular to develop preliminary ideas on the design of a part-time undergraduate certificate in biological sciences at the Department for Continuing Education (Chapter 4).