Innovation and Teaching Excellence Learning Lab (I-TELL)

I-TELL fosters excellence in teaching and learning by facilitating collaboration, advancing scholarship, delivering training, and promoting best practice.

About I-TELL

The name I-TELL reflects the essence of knowledge dissemination and sharing inherent in teaching and learning practices.

The term lab further accentuates a sense of playfulness and creativity, which is embodied in the Innovation and Teaching Excellence Learning Lab.

This dynamic space has been created to foster teaching and learning innovation and experimentation within the Faculty of Business and Law. It is a collaborative environment where faculty members can exchange, experiment with, and disseminate ideas on pedagogical approaches.

Through its playful yet purposeful approach, I-TELL promotes excellent education and enhances research capacity by nurturing the scholarship of teaching and learning.

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Support excellence in teaching and learning

I-TELL provides insights into best practices in the sector to enhance teaching and learning standards across departments and with international partners, in line with the University’s strategy.

Promote continuous professional development (CPD) and career progression

I-TELL facilitates CPD to enhance the competencies and expertise of faculty staff in teaching and learning in the UK and abroad. I-TELL fosters professional growth via mentoring, practical training workshops and seminars.

Organise events and conferences

I-TELL arranges events and conferences to facilitate the exchange of teaching practices and pedagogical research.

Provide project funding and support

I-TELL offers support and funding avenues for the development of impactful teaching and learning projects through internal funding as well as signposting to external funding calls fostering innovation in pedagogy.

Promote knowledge dissemination and showcase excellence

I-TELL provides a platform for staff to share their insights and expertise through teaching and learning blogs, webinars, and resource sharing. Additionally, I-TELL actively supports and promotes colleagues' scholarship of teaching and learning work through social media channels and a dedicated website.

Create a sense of belonging

I-TELL represents a physical and virtual platform for sharing best practices and for safely and bravely experimenting with innovative ideas in teaching and learning, fostering a sense of belonging among faculty colleagues.

Foster leadership and mentorship

I-TELL offers opportunities for colleagues to demonstrate leadership in teaching and learning through the initiation and leadership of enhancement projects and committee roles. Additionally, mentoring opportunities will be provided to support career progression and Advance HE fellowship attainment.

Enhance research capacity

I-TELL collaborates with existing research centres in the faculty and other teaching and learning groups across the sector to develop research capacity in business and law education, promoting research-informed teaching and encouraging the implementation of connected curricula.

Developing education excellence projects

  • Teaching evidence-based analytics (particularly human resource analytics) to non-cognate students

    This project addresses three objectives:

    • It identifies and explores the provision of evidence-based business analytics, with a focus on:
      • people analytics
      • forming a learning community that informs future-focused teaching
      • learning focused upon evidence-based people analytics
    • It develops an integrated programme of activities that address the skill requirements for innovative and authentic forms of assessment for post-COVID students including analytical, business knowledge and digital literacy.
    • It initiates an integrated Rise unit in people analytics to support non-cognate students across the faculty.

    This project aims to contribute to the development of a future-focused curriculum that delivers opportunities for stakeholders, including students and staff, to engage with the proliferation of analytics tools and relevant skills (analytical, IT and business knowledge Chiang, 2012) informed by ethical practice. 

    Student academic progress can be enhanced, particularly noting how students can be engaged in a learning community through a panel for people analytics.  This is envisaged to benefit not only units directly involved people analytics but also for research projects and business projects that are challenging for students.

    Project lead

  • Everybody Here Has A Story To Tell

    This project will use plot archetypes as a way of engaging and understanding experiential learning, primarily with post-experience learners from a managerial or entrepreneurial background, a majority of whom rely significantly or wholly on their experience over any formal training or education.

    While the use of narrative structures in learning design is relatively well established if under-used, the use of plot structures (such as Booker’s seven basic plots and the various incarnations of Campbell’s monomyth) is much less well-developed.

    The primary aim of this project is to use these models to develop a tool for enabling post-experience learners to better understand their own story by analysing it as an archetypal story with an inherent lesson, in much the same way our childhood is filled with myths and fairytales with morals and learning points. 

    The initial focus will be on managerial learners because of their heavy reliance on experience over formal education, but the final tool could offer a new assessment method for all experiential learners, and the work to develop this will also help inform the use of plot in the design of learning journeys.

    Project lead

  • Enhancing Management Education: Authentic Learning Through Action Research

    The aim of the project is to develop an alternative action research teaching and learning framework for project-based assignments that enables students, individually or as part of a group, to:

    • apply their academic knowledge and conceptual skills to address a live organisational issue
    • work collaboratively with others
    • critically reflect on their own way of working, enabling them to develop confidence and a range of high-level management and problem-solving investigative skills

    The project aligns itself with the University’s educational strategy toprovide an outstanding education experience and excellent graduate future.

    With an emphasis on authentic learning and emergent enquiry, the action research framework (define-plan-act-evaluate-reflect) is intended to equip students with the necessary confidence and capabilities to critically engage with and through action resolve workplace challenges.

    Project lead

  • Great Expectations – Examining the differing expectations and needs of students and staff of personal tutoring in Manchester Law School

    The personal tutoring relationship is crucial to a great student experience. It can be the difference between a happy and unhappy student journey and can determine whether a student progresses and graduates.

    The project uses a mixed-method approach to obtain, collect and analyse data, including surveys to obtain quantitative data and semi-structured interviews to obtain qualitative data from both staff and students.

    The analytical methods used are thematic analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis. It is also a piece of critically reflective research, using Brookfield’s four lenses of critical reflection, the students’ view, colleagues’ perceptions, personal experience and the academic theory and research literature in this area to reach conclusions.

    It is action research and seeks to find the answers to whether what we provide is fit for purpose and allows students to belong, rather than being forced to fit in. It is not yet complete but key themes emerging are:

    • students want to feel known and cared about
    • staff feel they lack time and confidence to provide the best support

    Project lead

Our collaborators

We work with a range of teaching and learning centres and groups.

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Centre for Education and Scholarship Research

Meet the team

Directors

Committee

We invite applications for I-TELL committee roles. These roles are open to Faculty of Business and Law staff on the Education, Pedagogy and Citizenship (EPC) pathway, and those not assigned to a pathway.

View the committee role descriptions.

If you are interested in joining the I-TELL committee, please complete and submit this expression of interest form by 5pm on 15 July 2024.

Members

All Faculty of Business and Law staff interested in teaching and learning – regardless of their career pathway, knowledge platform, or department affiliation – can join I-TELL as a member.

We encourage staff to join I-TELL alongside their discipline’s knowledge platform.

To join, complete the membership application form.

Advisory group

I-TELL is supported through an advisory group which includes:

  • Prof Andy Dainty, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education, Manchester Metropolitan University
  • Prof Fiona Saunders, Director of the Centre for Learning Enhancement and Educational Development (LEED), Manchester Metropolitan University
  • Prof Hannah Holmes, Deputy Faculty Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Business School, Manchester Metropolitan University
  • Prof Sally Everett, Vice Dean, Education, Deputy Dean (interim), King’s College London

Contacts

Contact us

For more information about our work or join the lab, contact I-TELL’s directors Dr Katharina De Vita and Prof Peter Wolstencroft.

k.de.vita@mmu.ac.uk
p.wolstencroft@mmu.ac.uk