My name is Sarah Dahl, and I am the Director of Education in the Department of Education Studies. I'm here as an internal panel member for the psychology ITLR.

 

I think my role has mainly been because I've been here a long time and I've worked in my department, but obviously collaborated with other departments and I have a key role in my department in terms of teaching and learning and the management and oversight of that. So all of that information has kind of fed into thinking about these discussions.

So the ITLR has contributed to the creation of a culture of collaboration by really mixing people up across the university. So actually there's very few opportunities in sort of the day-to-day work when you're really focused in your department to talk at length about issues relating to teaching and learning, quality assurance or kind of innovation with colleagues from other departments, particularly with colleagues from other faculties working alongside students from other departments rarely get to do that. So we work closely with our students and then also professional services more broadly. And so it gives an insight into how other departments all range of sizes do things and maybe sort of highlight some areas of synergy, some high areas of potential collaboration sort of for after this. So sort of like thinking about them as you go, well, I really want to, you know, try and get in touch with that person after this process when there's time to maybe continue some conversations.

A highlight of the ITLR for me I think is probably in that previous answer, which is that opportunity to hear, I guess for me, getting to sort of know one other department as well as you do, we would never normally have that much access to how they're thinking about things, how they're doing things. So in their Self-Evaluation Document (SED), for example, just really sort of saying this is how we do things and noticing the differences in there and being able to take away ideas for our department just at that level. Then coming onto the panel and having colleagues from other departments and then sort of saying, oh, they do it like this and we do it like this. So you get sort of a condensed opportunity to hear from other departments and that really is a kind of highlight.