BSI Education

Standards in action

Educational resources

All the materials suggested within this section are designed to meet the aim of 'Standards in Action' to:

'Provide authoritative and supportive resources about quality and standards for students and academics alike, within higher education in a way that will help to improve processes of teaching and learning'.

The following are included:

  • Classroom materials and teaching notes
  • PowerPoint slides
  • Starters and Plenaries
  • Links

When considering content, the following have been taken into account. The resource:

  • should be viewed as organic and, as with any web presence, is capable of being expanded, fine-tuned, updated and further developed over time.
  • has flexible or multiple levels of focus so that the resources can be used by undergraduates and postgraduates. It would be wrong to define the site in terms of undergraduate or postgraduate content, as there will be considerable overlap between the levels. Identifying levels of suitability is also a matter of interpretation. For example, there is a transferability of knowledge and findings from research and post-graduate work into materials that are made available for learning and teaching at undergraduate level.
  • is complementary, so that each area or part of the resource contributes in some way to student development and understanding of quality and standard-related practices as well as current and modern thinking. For example, case studies reflect practice, research explores current thinking about issues and also helps students to identify relevant and topical reading from the references, while other resources are focused on teaching and learning.
  • should be viewed as relevant for teaching and learning processes in a way that enables it to reflect good pedagogy and 'best practice'. The resource is also capable of being rigorous.
  • is potentially transferable across disciplines. This is actually quite important. Quality and standards are areas that are relevant across all disciplines in education and it is arguable that, no matter what role you are in across the private or public sector, all individuals have to relate what they do to some quality-based framework. In fact some of the best examples of quality-led practices come from education rather than business, because in education organisations are heavily monitored for their quality and practices. The journal and the academic articles are at the heart of this issue. Even though the contributions focus upon teaching and learning, they have an explicable link to the learning about quality and standards within a business focus. The references, seminal work used to support the articles, as well as the analysis and discussion, all provide a real opportunity for students to broaden their personal reading and research.

Classroom materials and teaching notes

Within higher education lecturers use notes or write a paper that supports their teaching. The papers included here are widely sourced, from a range of different areas and can be presented to or used with students within the classroom.

Materials are supplied as pdf and are properly referenced, thus meaning they could be adapted to the house style for each individual university and might be capable of being adapted so that a lecturer's own interpretations and perspectives could be developed. The classroom materials within the notes/papers exemplify good practice and provide a series of practical activities.

Note: Any use of the materials should acknowledge the BSI site as the source.

PowerPoint slides

PowerPoint slides have increasingly become a standard pedagogy in higher education, particularly for the formal lecture. The slides take account of an undergraduate audience and attempt to exemplify and develop 'good practice'. Such slides, wherever possible, refer to real and contemporary issues as well as to organisations. Where sources are used within the slides, these are acknowledged and referenced using the Harvard system of referencing.

Starters and plenaries

A lot of emphasis in recent years has been placed upon the notion of starters and plenaries as a method of introducing and concluding sessions against lesson objectives. They are seen as good practice. The activities are short, around 15 minutes long, but attempt to use best practice, to practically engage students in challenging activities that encourage them to think.

For example,

Case studies

Case studies are at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education classrooms. Case studies were chosen as they are of 'real life', are holistic and enable investigation of the relationships between the component parts of the case. In his classic book on case study, Yin (1994) points out that a case study is an empirical enquiry which:

allows investigation into a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between the phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.

The investigation can be explanatory. As Robson (1993) remarks, the case study answers 'why' and 'how' questions. S turman (1994) broadly agrees:

Human systems develop a characteristic wholeness or integrity and are not simply a loose collection of traits.
...to generalise or predict from a single example requires an in-depth investigation of the interdependencies of the parts and of the patterns that emerge.

So does Stake (1995), who describes doing a case study as 'coming to understand the activity [of a single case] within important circumstances'. It is an appreciation of these circumstances, alongside theoretical support, efficacy and underpinning that provide students within a classroom with a broad understanding of interrelated concepts that contribute to an issue.

The BSI website provides access to a number of potentially rich sources of case studies, including those within the Business Improvement Zone. The case studies do vary both in length and complexity. BSI also has some video case studies amongst its resources. (see links section)

Links

This section provides links to related resources and information. These may go to journal articles on the web, organisations involved with monitoring standards, business organisations that have case studies and instances related to standards and quality, as well as a host of other sources.