Teaching resources
The Faculty Room
Ideas, formats and time-savers for people who teach at university level — shared by people who get it.
Keep assessments original for every cohort, without lowering the bar
Reuse last year's exam and risk leaks, or rewrite it under end-of-term pressure? There's a third option: fresh every cohort, at the same standard, without the hours.
Read more →Holistic vs analytic rubrics: which one fits your course
Most of us pick a rubric type without noticing we picked one. The two main types answer different questions — one is faster to mark, the other is far easier to defend. Here's how to tell which your assessment needs.
Read more →Summative assessment examples that aren't just another final exam
Most courses end the same way: a three-hour exam, or an essay. Both are fine instruments — for the narrow thing they measure. Here are ten summative formats, what each one actually lets you see, and how to pick the one your outcomes ask for.
Read more →Types of assessment in education, and when each one earns its place
Diagnostic, formative, summative, ipsative — the vocabulary is familiar, but the useful question isn't what each type is called. It's what each one is for, and what it costs you to run it.
Read more →Grade the 60th paper like you graded the first
By the fortieth submission, the standard you started with has quietly drifted. It isn't carelessness, it's what a vague rubric leaves to a tired evening. Here's how to grade the last paper the way you graded the first.
Read more →Using AI for course design without dumbing it down
The fear is fair: most AI writes bland, generic, lowest-common-denominator content. But the dumbing down doesn't come from AI — it comes from AI that ignores your course. Here's the difference, and how to use it without lowering the bar.
Read more →\"Activities are just games\" — and other myths that keep the lecture on life support
There's a quiet prejudice in higher education: that classroom activities are playtime, fine for schools but beneath a serious university. It's wrong — and it's costing us the most rigorous teaching we could be doing.
Read more →Your students have changed. Why our course formats haven't kept up.
The empty seats aren't laziness. Students have changed — and the lecture is losing a competition it didn't know it was in. Adapting is the obvious answer; affording to experiment is the hard part.
Read more →From case studies to simulations and exams: 15 university-level activity formats
How many genuinely different activity formats have you used this year? A tour of fifteen rigorous, classroom-ready formats — and why the hard part was never the list, it's the fit.
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