Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching & Learning

The first, 15-credit course is designed to enable participants to begin to link educational practice, evidence, and theory in order to design, deliver and evaluate courses and programmes for both undergraduates and taught postgraduates.

It encourages participants to experiment with, and take a critical, scholarly stance on, different approaches to learning, teaching and assessment.

Course workshops are designed to facilitate participants’ engagement with pedagogical literature, to challenge current approaches to teaching and to encourage planning for their further professional development in the learning and teaching arena.

The second, 15-credit course is designed to expand participants’ sense of contemporary issues and challenges that are facing higher education currently.

The course explores topical themes, such as ‘Reasons to Teach, Values of Learning Theories, Nurturing Learning Communities, and Academic Identity'. Sessions introduce participants to some of the latest research and thinking on learning and teaching.

An underpinning principle of the course is to develop participants’ ability to formulate pedagogic enquiry, to evaluate learning and teaching activities, and to lay the foundations for participation in educational research during the final course.

The final course is a year-long, 30-credit course, which provides participants with the opportunity to plan and conduct a piece of practitioner-based research, where  staff undertake a small-scale research project in their own teaching practice. Participants are supported along the way by an experienced supervisor, alongside a suite of development sessions that address the key points of undertaking research, including educational research methods, publishing pedagogic research, ethics, and digital scholarship.