EduFest 2026

Thank you for joining us for EduFest 2026!

Our annual Learning & Teaching conference was held the week of the 15th June 2026, which brought together a community of teaching and learning practice from across the University to celebrate, share, and showcase the exciting and innovative approaches that are taking place. The conference included workshops, demonstrations, presentations and keynote speakers.

Thank you for joining us for EduFest 2026!

Keynote Speakers

Our first Keynote, James Norman, Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering, University of Bath will talk us through Sharing is caring – how sharing our practice enables us all to be better teacher. James is an educator, engineer, designer, thought leader and practitioner in the field of sustainable and regenerative design. He has published 6 books including the Regenerative Structural Engineer and Micro Record Label. He is an award-winning educator (National Teaching Fellowship 2020) and excellent communicator, who enjoys presenting in unconventional ways.

This was followed by a keynote from Rushana on Visibility and Personal Brand for Career Development. Dr Rushana Khusainova is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Education Lead at the University of Bristol Business School, and co-chair of the Business Education Research and Scholarship (BERS) Network. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Rushana is passionate about shaping the future of business education through regenerative business, the ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI), and the development of a thriving culture of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

Find out about Edufest

EduFest is our annual Learning and Teaching conference, 2026 was extended to a full week of exploration and inspiration.
The week-long programme was carefully designed to support colleagues in reflecting on and enhancing their approaches to learning and teaching. Spread across five days, EduFest featured keynote sessions, interactive workshops, and networking opportunities.

Programme of Events 2026

Day one – Monday 15th June 2026

Welcome to Edufest Week:

Dr Chris Bonfield, Director for the Centre of Learning & Teaching

Talking Point: Enhancing Student Engagement Through Educational Games: Kseniya Stsiampkouskaya, School of Management

Educational games are an effective way to boost student engagement and support experience‑based learning. They help students apply theory to practice, build key skills, and develop competencies such as teamwork, communication, problem‑solving, and decision‑making. Interdisciplinary games also strengthen systems thinking by highlighting links between subjects and revealing learning gaps.

Talking Point: Measuring students’ metacognition in subjects delivered through active learning methodologies – Nuno Reis, Department of Chemical Engineering

Collaborative learning environments enhance the student experience and are compatible with traditional exams, but a gap often exists between perceived and actual learning. In advanced chemical engineering units, this disconnect appears linked to limited student metacognition and reliance on last‑minute revision strategies.

Lightning Talk: Are oral presentations still fit for purpose in higher education? – Cressida Lyon, Department of Life Sciences

Oral communication is a key employability skill, and oral presentation assessments are widely used at the University of Bath.

Comfort and refreshment break

From Passive to Participatory: Using Mentimeter, H5P and Xerte Effectively: Lynn Cheong-White & Eliana Cortez Paez, Centre for Learning & Teaching

How can we move beyond passive delivery and create more engaging, participatory learning experiences?

In this session, colleagues will share practical examples of how they are using tools such as Mentimeter (Gamila Shoib, Gwen Scott, Dimo Dimov and Mariachiara Barzotto), H5P (Leah McCue), and Xerte (Richard Joiner & Eliana Cortes) to support interaction, encourage student voice, and structure meaningful classroom activities. From large lectures to smaller teaching settings, you’ll hear how these approaches help students prepare, contribute, work collaboratively, and reflect more actively during sessions.

Day two – Tuesday 16th June 2026 – Hybrid

Lightning Talk: Authentic Learning and Assessment in Action: Sanchia Jones, School of Management

The Be Ambitious Challenge is a six‑week experiential learning programme, co‑created and delivered collaboratively between Central Services, School-based teams, and Accenture. Grounded in a Design Thinking framework, the initiative was developed to provide a substantive professional experience for School of Management undergraduate students on three‑year degrees who do not undertake a placement year.

Lightning Talk: Producing unique data sets for coursework: Ollie Thomasson, School of Management
With increasing student numbers, collusion on coursework becomes more likely. In data-based work, having a large number of students working from the same data set further compounds this risk.

Talking Point: Team Based Learning (TBL) in Biosciences: active, applied and effective – but how can we ensure inclusivity? :Cressida Lyon, Jo Stewart-Cox and Zoe Burke, Department of Life Sciences

Team Based Learning (TBL) is a flipped learning approach which promotes active recall and application of knowledge in a team setting. In 2023-24, TBL was piloted in the Department of Life Sciences. Student perception of TBL was positive, and TBL was rolled out on a larger scale.

Talking Point: A Comparison of Formative and Summative Tests in Team-Based Learning: Gratsiela Madzharova, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Formative and summative assessment each offer distinct benefits for student motivation and learning. In TeamBased Learning (TBL), readiness assurance tests (RATs) can be implemented in either mode, yet their relative impact remains unclear.

Comfort and refreshment break

Living the Assessment for Learning Design Principles

Abby Osborne & Ellie Kendall, Centre for Learning & Teaching

A session where Abby and Ellie speak briefly about the process of distilling the original Assessment for Learning Design Principles, that was developed as part of the Curriculum Transformation project, into 8 core principles and linking those to helpful resources. Laurent Perge, Department of Mechanical Engineering will then speak about ‘living the AfL principles’ through their assessment design, outlining the order in which they thought about each principle.

Day three – Wednesday 17th June 2026 – In Person (10 West 2.47)

The event took place in person featuring presentations from the winners of the Teaching Excellence Awards 2026. Parallel sessions from Teaching Development Fund Projects, our VIP projects and other professional development practices.

Slides from the morning sessions are available.

Refreshments and Pastries

Welcome: Dr Christopher Bonfield, Director of the Centre for Learning & Teaching

Keynote Speaker:

Sharing is caring – how sharing our practice enables us all to be better teachers

James Norman, Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering, UoB

Keynote Speaker:

Visibility and Personal Brand for Career Development

Rushana Khusainova, University of Bristol

Lighting talks from the CLT on Celebrating Fellowship, PedR Network , Accessibility, VR Demo, TEL CoP.

Break and Refreshments

We heard from some of our 2026 University Teaching Award Winners;

Best Team – Bath Team Heart Supervisors – Melusine Pigeon.
Innovation – Lukasz Piwek, School of Management
Academic Advisor – David Liptrot, Chemistry
Director of Studies – Eleanor Nichols, Physics
John Willis – Jack Spicer, Social & Policy Sciences
Leadership – Tina Duren, Chemical Engineering

Lunch provided, opportunity to Network and find out more from about ongoing initiatives.

Parallel Session A:

Teaching in the open lane: practical approaches to GenAI and assessment: Richard Mason, Centre for Learning & Teaching & James Fern, Department for Health

This session, hosted by the university’s AI and Education Leads, will feature four short reflections on teaching in contexts in which students have access to AI tools:

‘Reflections on Two Lane’ — Richard Mason, Centre for Learning & Teaching
‘Why I don’t give students ready-made prompts’ — Lukasz Piwek, School of Management
‘Authentic assessment to develop competencies for applied practitioners’ — Alison Tincknell-Smith, Department for Health
‘Engagement, attendance and GenAI’ — James Fern, Department for Health

Talking Point: AI and employability: Catherine Knocks, Careers Service

AI is reshaping the world of work, highlighting challenges and opportunities.

Parallel Session B: Power point for session

Talking Point: Apply teaching and learning to a Vertically Integrated Project: Brian Rutter, Department of Mechanical Engineering

VIPs offer an opportunity to work with other students and engage with projects that uses their current capabilities and skills and develop wider skills of project management, collaboration, interpersonal and technical skills.

Talking Point: Serious Games for Management Learning: Baris Yalabik, School of Management

We present our experience of running the new unit Serious Games for Management Learning. On this unit, students play a series of games to reflect on themselves as strategic thinkers, decision-makers, and team members.

Talking Point: Using gamification to boost engagement: Yarden Brody, Department of Physics

What makes video games fun? This fascinating topic has kept psychologists busy over the last few decades, resulting in the term “gamification” – the process of integrating the aspects of a game that make it engaging into non-game contexts.

Talking Point: Taking Students to the Knowledge Frontier with AI: build your own reading list: Cristiana Lafuente Martinez, Department of Economics

Instead of selecting papers for study in a final-year course, we used AI tools to find and summarise papers in a series of online workshops. Each session is centred around a topic, like “what is the effect of unemployment benefits on unemployment duration?” Then the students are asked to find empirical literature on it using AI tools.

Break and Refreshments

Parallel Session C:

Workshop: Reflective Learning Practice: Daniel Barker, Centre for Learning & Teaching

This session explores why helping learners reflect on how they learn is just as important as what they learn. We will consider practical ways to embed reflection into teaching and assessment, supporting students to become autonomous, critical, and confident learners.

Slides from this session include anything that was worked on together as a group (In Red) aswell as the Framework Codesign.

Parallel Session D:

Workshop: Authentic learning with agentic AI: Steve Cayzer, Department of Mechanical Engineering & Nick Petrov, BEng(Hons) Integrated Design Engineering

Authentic tasks involve “ill-structured” challenges and roles that help students rehearse for the complex ambiguities of the “game” of adult and professional life. Role play can be one way to achieve this. Students have to ask the agent appropriate questions to elicit valuable information – the agent may be unwilling or unable to give totally open, frank, accurate and complete responses. Students learn from this appropriate communication skills in a ‘safe’ environment. Such approaches are rich, valuable – and time consuming. Agentic AI gives an opportunity to scale up these approaches by configuring an agent with the appropriate ‘personality’.

Summary and close: Paul Chin, Head of Learning & Teaching, CLT

Day four – Thursday 18th June 2026 – Online

Talking Point: Decolonising the Curriculum at Bath – Monna Matharu, Student Recruitment & Admissions

Decolonising the curriculum is a growing priority in higher education, yet its meaning and implementation remain inconsistent, making change hard to evaluate. Monna Matharu, UoB Access and Participation Impact Officer, will present findings from the University of Bath APP evaluation report, exploring how decolonising practices can strengthen students’ sense of belonging, the degree to which students feel accepted, valued, and included in their academic community.

Belonging is shaped in part by whether students see their histories, knowledge systems, and identities reflected in what and how they are taught. Broadening whose voices and ways of knowing are centered in the curriculum can therefore be a powerful lever for fostering inclusion across a diverse student body.

Lightning Talk: Epistemic Humility: The Lecture Hall Must Remain a Space of Doubt – Matthew Alford, Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies
Everyone talks about ideological silos these days, but in academia the consequences land hard. On the one hand, we’re pushed to chase “impact” and public engagement. On the other, we’re acutely aware of a “post-truth era” where whole swathes of society are too entrenched even to discuss their assumptions on identity politics, war, and public health. In times like these, it’s worth remembering that the most rigorous thinkers in history treated certainty with suspicion and that it is important to have a strong sense of where one’s own expertise begins and ends.

Lightning Talk: Uni & You: Supporting Students to Set Themselves up for Success: Ashleigh Curl & Maria Christou, School of Management
Uni & You is a programme of events designed to give students practical strategies for success. We brought expert voices to the forefront and created a sense of community, ensuring sessions were inclusive and responsive to diverse student experiences.

Lightning Talk: Exploring the accessibility of the University of Bath campus using a photovoice methodology: Stella Duego, Tannin Jeffrey, Phoebe Chipchase, MRes Students

Our research explored the accessibility of the University of Bath campus using a photovoice methodology, focusing on the lived experiences of disabled students. However, we would also be happy to give a broader talk about student accessibility in higher education more generally, sharing insights and raising awareness that could support teachers and advisers in guiding prospective students.

Talking Point: Building a Coherent, Scalable Framework for Embedding Sustainability Pathways Across the Curriculum
Steve Cayzer, Department of Mechanical Engineering

The University of Bath has a strategic goal to embed meaningful sustainability learning for all our students. However, sustainability opportunities are often fragmented, with strong individual initiatives lacking integration with each other or with the formal curriculum. This presentation introduces a coherent, scalable framework that unites these activities without requiring significant additional resource or adding burden to staff and students.

Comfort and refreshment break

Planning for e-portfolios: A structured approach to help you design with confidence: Rachel Applegate, Centre for Learning & Teaching

Discover a guided approach to design effective e‑portfolio activities. In this interactive one‑hour workshop, we will use a practical planning guide to clarify key design decisions, and to explore core elements of e‑portfolio design in Mahara. Ideal for anyone creating a new portfolio activity, refining an existing one, or if you are simply curious to explore what e‑portfolios can offer.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

Outline the role of e‑portfolios in supporting reflection, skills development, and assessment for learning.
Apply a structured planning framework to design or enhance an e‑portfolio activity.
Identify key decisions related to assessment design, feedback, and student induction and guidance.
Recognise the core design elements of Mahara e-portfolio and how they support different portfolio activities.

Day five – Friday 19th June 2026 – Online

Joined by Node XR for an online demo of an AI-powered, no-code XR platform that enables educators to author VR, AR, and 360° learning scenarios directly from a browser. We will build a complete multi-scene scenario live, featuring the new Node XR AI Scenario Generator, which can draft entire scenarios from a single prompt.

Thank you for your Contributions

Stayed tuned a round up of the week

Find out last years Edufest 2025

Reflections on the day and recordings available