Welcome Back!

First of all, Xin Nian Kuai Le! We wish you all a happy and prosperous Year of the Monkey!

I hope you all had a good break. In the AEC, we have been busy preparing for the new semester, which promises to be an exciting one! We are very pleased to have Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner as the keynote speakers at the Annual Learning and Teaching Colloquium. Please have a look at the pages about the Colloquium in this newsletter, which have all the relevant information.

Another upcoming event is of course SURF, and the call for applications has now gone out, so we look forward to receiving your proposals.

Great news is that our CPS programme has successfully be accredited by the UK Higher Education Academy. The CPS is now aligned to the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education (UK PSF) which enables XJTLU staff to claim recognition as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

In the meantime, the Educational Technologies Team has been very busy preparing the ICE environment for the new semester, and it would seem that all has run pretty smoothly.

You will see on our PGR page the semester two programme for related workshops; some being repeated from semester one for our new intake and some new such as the 'impact of research’ and’ exchanging ideas with peers/alumni’ workshops'. These are opened for any PGR student. 

We have added some extra information on this welcome page that focus on our forthcoming enhancement activities and events for the academic community.

We also, let you know about the current projects members of the AEC are involved with either exclusively AEC or in collaboration with colleagues across the University. This is to highlight that as promoters of educational development, we too need to continually develop in our practice.

Hope to see you around during our upcoming events and activities!

Finally, I would  like to welcome Greg Rogala to XJTLU. Greg is employed as an Instructional Designer at IBSS for four days and will work and support the AEC Educational Technologies Team for one day a week. Please see his short bio below.

Best wishes to you all, and I hope you have a successful and enjoyable semester.

James

• Jiangsu Department of Education (DoE) project:

"Assessing the Development and Standard of Fully English-taught Curriculums in Jiangsu Province."

• Book Chapter:

"The role of educational developers in aligning diverse learning and teaching styles in a transnational university."

• Book Chapter:

"Inspiring learning through research and inquiry: the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU)."

My name is Greg and I recently started working as an Instructional Designer for the IBSS, with one day per week for AEC. I first came to China in 2012 and worked in Dalian for the University of Southampton. After that, I decided to move to Ningbo to work for the Nottingham University and now I’m working for XJTLU. I hope I will have a great time during my stay here.

I was born in Poland but I also spent a significant part of my life living in Italy and the UK. I come from an EFL/EAP teaching background but after graduating from the University of Westminster in London I developed a strong professional interest in learning technology, blended learning as well as the use of Internet related technologies in autonomous learning. In my previous jobs, I worked in a number of roles which all involved the use of technology in the classroom as well as the VLE platforms such as Moodle.

In my free time, I really enjoy photography and you can check out my Flickr photostream.