Centre for Learning Enhancement and Educational Development

One of the core functions of the innovation and initiative strand is the development, maintenance and delivery of an institutional approach to innovation. It does this through its Education Innovation Strategy.

The Innovation Strategy is made up of four key priorities, and associated delivery mechanisms:

• Catalysing Innovation within shared priorities, supported through our Communities of Practice.

• Creating Platform for the delivery of innovative ideas, supported through our Education Innovation Scholar Scheme.

• Capturing Significance measuring impact through our Evaluation Framework.

• Leveraging Reputation through our Externalisation Framework.

Communities of Practice

LEED coordinates a portfolio of institutional communities of practice. These support an institutional conversation about critical themes in teaching, learning, curriculum design and student support.

These are thematic areas identified as critical in the mobilisation of the strategy. They provide a space for open discussion and collaboration on critical themes such as: 

• active learning
• authentic and flexible assessment
• digital me
• belonging and mattering
• closing differential gaps

The Collective

Working with LEED, The Collective will bring together academic and professional services colleagues from across the University who are working on addressing the racial equity gaps in degree-awarding. 

Please visit The Collective for more information.

LEED supports a range of approaches to encourage and support staff innovation, including the Innovation Scholar Scheme.

The Education Innovation Scholarship Scheme enables staff on the Education, Pedagogy and Citizenship (EPC) pathway, and those in student-facing professional services roles, to lead our institutional approach to teaching, learning and student support. Those involved work on a range of projects from implementing enhancement activities targeting specific groups of students, to leading University or Faculty/Directorate initiatives.

If you are a member of staff, please visit Education Innovation Scholarship Scheme (staff only) for more information.

The lifelong learning entitlement (LLE), the government’s flagship initiative to ‘transform’ the post-18 student finance system in England will, according to the Department for Education (2024), allow people to develop skills and gain new qualifications – enabling them to train, retrain and upskill flexibly over their working lives.

Read more about how Manchester Met has been experimenting with the LLE opportunity here: Navigating the Maze of Lifelong Learning: Insights from Inside the Pilot  - Mâir Bull, Manchester Metropolitan University

Future me plan supports our students with their personal and professional development from the moment they are offered a place at Manchester Met, to graduation and beyond.

Students are encouraged to look into the future and explore opportunities to support their development through the personal tutoring framework, unit-related activities or a combination of both.

By repeating a four-stage cycle, students will:

• Map - Plan your journey and set short or long term goals.
• Experience - Try a range of different experiences.
• Reflect - Consider how your experiences have shaped your thinking.
• Share - Curate your story and share with others.

There are a number of core enabling activities that the Digital Education team support staff with in delivering digitally enhanced learning, teaching and assessment provided by the Digitally Enhanced Teaching, Learning and Assessment (DELTA) strategy.

The development of a leading-edge, digitally enhanced approach to education that leverages the University’s intellectual, physical, and digital assets lies at the heart of the Manchester Met educational experience.

For more information about how we continue to use and further develop digital technologies and practices at Manchester Met, please visit Delta Strategy Overview .

Moodle provides the core of our virtual learning environment (VLE). It provides teaching staff with a set of online tools that support learning, teaching and assessment.

Our support and in-depth guides cover topics such as Moodle for active learning, accessibility, formative assessment and much more. Whether our academic staff are creating a Moodle space from scratch, or are developing an existing page, we have a range of support to cover everything there is to know.

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) 

We have a large number of VR and AR software available for staff to use within their subject areas, from VR headsets to AR technology including Blippar, Layar and Wikitude. AR and VR can create opportunities to bring various ideas and environments to provide students with highly interactive, visually based understanding of such concepts without leaving the classroom.

The Cave

The Computational Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) is an immersive learning environment. This technology allows multimedia content to be interacted with, giving participants a virtual, immersive experience of the projected environment. The CAVE can be used for a wide range of teaching and learning activities including simulation, sensory, interactive activities and quizzes.

Lecture Capture is a system that captures lecture content (audio and projector output). Lecture Capture enhances learning by allowing our students to replay and revisit their lectures, supporting their own independent learning and improving inclusivity of our key resources.

We have a large suite of apps available to support a wide range of active learning practices within teaching and learning.

Among many more, these include:

• Vevox: an interactive classroom response system.
• Miro: a collaborative visual canvas that enables synchronous and asynchronous working to plan, develop ideas, create diagrams and flowcharts, and promote student engagement and assessment.
• Padlet:  A simple-to-use and versatile digital whiteboard. Padlet is ideal for both synchronous or asynchronous, individual or group discussion and collaboration activities.