O'Really?

July 28, 2026

Celebrating Teaching & Learning at the “Glastonbury Festival of Scholarship” 2026

Filed under: education — Duncan Hull @ 1:53 pm
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Every year hundreds of my colleagues gather at a conference in Manchester to talk about teaching & learning at the Glastonbury Festival of Scholarship. It’s not actually called that but since there’s no actual Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts in this fallow year of 2026, I’m looking for alternatives to the midsummer Somerset vibes from my neck of the woods down in the West Country. Festivals and conferences have some similarities, so let’s see where this musical analogy works, and where it breaks, while reviewing some of this years conference highlights.

Figure 1: Delegates at the ITL Conference, if this is the Glastonbury Festival of Scholarship then University Place (pictured) is the Pyramid Stage

This particular annual festival and conference showcases some of the scholarship at The University of Manchester that makes teaching and learning better for everyone: students, teachers, staff, collaborators and employers. It’s called the Institute of Teaching & Learning (ITL) Conference. While Glastonbury passed its 40th iteration and 50th anniversary in 2025, the ITL conference is just getting going, with the 2026 conference being the 4th event in as many years. With more than 45,000 students on 1,000 different degree programmes at the University, there’s a lot of ground to cover during the two days. There are seven parallel tracks (or stages if you prefer) spread across several floors in University Place. This means you can only realistically expect to see about a seventh (~15%) of what’s going on while missing the other ~85% of the conference. I went to more than twenty presentations, including keynotes and plenaries. What’s ITL conference like and is it worth attending? How can you join in? Can you see any decent performances? How could it be better when it returns in 2027? Here’s some highlights from the 15% of the conference I managed to sample.

Partner-Enabled Learning

A central focus for this years’ conference was partner enabled learning where students work with employers, public bodies and community organisations in cross-disciplinary projects as an assessed part of their course. A good example of this is the partnership between the Manchester United Foundation, Oxfam, Age UK and the Department of Materials where Lindsay Pressdee, Dr Jo Conlon and Dr Amy Benstead have been teaching students about the circular economy with community embedded learning on the BSc Fashion courses. [1]

It has been estimated by This Is FC88 that 20 million shirts like the one in Figure 2 have been discarded since the FIFA World Cup 2026™ – Canada, Mexico and the United States finished last week, see for example this post from Joanna Czutkowna FRSA. In 2026, around 30 final year students will complete a course called Sustainability in Action where they will upcycle unwanted football shirts following on from earlier pilot feasability projects. Recycling all this “waste” is challenging not just because of the volume of it, but because there are strict rules about what can be done with logos and the synthetic material can be much more difficult to work with than natural fibres like cotton.

Figure 2: Three Lions On A Shirt, hung out to dry by Argentina. Sixty years of hurt, never stopped me dreaming. It has been estimated that that 20 million football shirts like this one will be discarded after the FIFA World Cup 2026

Another example of partner enabled learning was provided by Sarah Knighton, Harsha Parmar, Sadia Ibraham and Eisha M. with the Greater Manchester Cancer Alliance who have been teaching students on the Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) course. Trainee pharmacists act as a front door for patients talking about cancer, before they speak to a doctor. Pharmacists are the front line for NHS England, because they are often the first person a patient will talk to. See co-created learning through lived experience and partner engagement. [1]

From a pharmacy we moved to aphasia, an impairment in a person’s ability to comprehend or formulate language. Molly Smithies, Caroline Sutton and Steph Greenwood-Davies described The Connections Café: A service learning model for inclusive communication and community. [1] The cafe trains future language therapists on the BSc Speech and Language Therapy course who support people in the local community with language difficulties.

In her plenary Helen Walkington talked about partner enabled learning in the context of undergraduate research projects such as those found in the Get Published! initiative at Oxford Brookes University. GetPublished! supports students in developing research literacy and communication skills. Another example is GeoVerse, an undergraduate journal for Geographers. Undergraduate research has highlighted ten salient practices for providing robust and high-quality learning published by Centre for Engaged Learning at Elon University. Around 5% of undergraduate students at Oxford Brookes publish their research in GetPublished! For an example, see creating a prototype of a smartphone application to track the progress of individuals recovering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) in partnership with Oxford Head Injury Services.

Jennifer O’Brien described her work with the University Living Lab where research projects are framed within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The project returns quality research to partner organisations who provide problems for students to work on including from Manchester City Council, The Old Abbey Taphouse and many others, see University Living Lab: Addressing social and environmental challenges through existing assessment. [1]

Representing the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester, I gave a presentation on partner enabled learning describing our experience with building and running a mentoring scheme for students learning software engineering. We started this ten years ago by partnering with local employers starting in Manchester (Graphene Valley) including Booking.com, Arm, JLR, IBM, Siemens, the BBC and as the program got bigger we’ve had mentors from further afield including Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (Silicon Valley). Thanks to all our mentors which you can find out more about at industry-club.manchester.ac.uk/mentoring.html and in the paper. [2]

Figure 3: From Manchester for the world, taken from the Manchester 2035 strategy displayed in University Place. If you look closely, this panoramic picture has cloned Rachel Studd four times!

The AI in Higher Education Permathread

Predictably Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominated many of the talks and not just those where it was the theme of the session, it’s the permathread that’s here to stay whether we like it or not. Many delegates reported grappling with thorny and wicked problems that generative AI presents in Higher Education, particularly around academic integrity. What changes need to be made to teaching to help students use AI in a professional, responsible way that enriches rather than detracts from their learning? What skills should teachers focus on empowering their students with? Which are the most important and why? There are lots of difficult existential questions that have no easy answers.

Rather than using Microsoft CoPilot now available across the University, several groups reported making their own custom Large Language Models (LLMs) tailored to specific teaching tasks. An example was presented by Paul Baguley, Ian Stewart, Louise Edmondson, Auzair Khan, Ziru Tao and Linxi Xu. They’ve created tools based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for use in teaching the management of projects in collaboration with Sodexo, Bentley and Rolls-Royce, see a research informed generative AI framework to provide context in project management. [1]

Dr Homa Molavi and Dr. Kamal Qazi MAPM, SFHEA presented a Cross institutional AI-Driven Framework [1] while Salman Shahid talked about Evaluating Generative AI potential and integrating it in Chemical Engineering Education [1]. Lightning talks are a good way to see lots of stuff in a short period of time, here’s some I managed to see on AI:

  • The use of AI tutors in science and engineering with Daniel Engstrøm, Christina Picken and Patricia Munoz-Escalona. Good teaching often involves asking diagnostic questions of students using the socratic method. Daniel and co have created custom AI’s created with “personalities” to do some of this questioning. [1]
  • Writing an L-AI (lay article for the layperson) with Dirk Engelberg, Alison Harvey and Katie Moore gave an opportunity for students to have a discussion about boundaries and professional AI use by peer-reviewing an AI generated article. One problem is that with model capabilities rapidly changing, course materials need rewriting every year because what can’t be done by AI one year, is trivially done by AI the next. [1]
  • Teaching programming in the AI era with Lijing Lin. Lijing is teaching diverse students without a technical background to write code. The foundations still matter, even though a calculator can crunch numbers for you, students still need to understand what the calculator is doing on their behalf. There are big risks with AI in programming which include students trying to skip code comprehension. [1]
  • Designing AI-resistant Assessment and Perry’s scheme of Dualism, Multiplicity, Relativism, and Commitment within Relativism with Professor Jenni Rose. Jenni encourages her students to realise that sometimes there isn’t a “right answer” using a framework provided Perry’s scheme. [1]
Figure 4: Questions, questions so many questions! Many of the talks were accompanied by lively Q&A sessions

Sense of belonging and social justice

Sense of belonging and social justice were recurrent themes, two presentations I enjoyed on this were

  1. Belonging, Voice and Agency: Co-designing mentoring with international students with Lei Zeng, Wennie Subramonian and Lalrinzuali Fanai described creating materials to train 20 mentors working with 60 mentees for students outside the UK. Subjects include “speaking Manc”, travelling in Manchester, understanding the NHS – all things that UK students take for granted, but might seem incomprehensibly quirky and British to international students. I look forward to seeing this material when it is publicly available in the autumn. [1]
  2. In fashion again, Lisa Taylor talked about the KÁYÒMI Digital Sustainability Platform this looks like it would make a good student project for the Imago Software team. The project partners with African industry stakeholders, KÁYÒMI – ‘Cherish Our Garments’, a circular fashion initiative developed in collaboration with BITTANY. [1]

Which brings us full circle back to partners again …

Returning to partnerships and authentic assessment

Partnerships can make assessment more authentic, and authentic assessment is a subject in its own right. Two presentations caught my eye:

  • Elika Aminian, Louise Walker and Rose Wagstaffe presented work on developing an authentic coursework assessment for actuarial science. [1] I didn’t realise the maths degree had so many flavours, it’s available with Physics, Computer Science, Philosophy, Finance and Actuarial Science.
  • Stewart Blakeway and Uli Sattler presented work on scaling authentic learning: evaluating a large-cohort poster showcase in undergraduate Computer Science. [1]There was an interesting discussion on if this exercise should be formative or summative and if some kind of publication was possible.

The conference finished where we started with a final plenary with John Holden, Samira Kaissi from Unit M, George Moulton and Lee Pugalis, chaired by Jenn Hallam shown in figure 5.

Figure 5: From left to right John Holden, Samira Kaissi, George Moulton, Lee Pugalis and Jenn Hallam discuss Innovation in Action: Reimagining the Student Experience.

The panel explored how teaching and innovation can together become a defining feature of the student experience at the University of Manchester. The session examined how partner-enabled learning, entrepreneurship education, interdisciplinary collaboration and real-world challenge-led teaching can help prepare students to thrive in a rapidly changing economy and society. The panellists discussed how the University can create the culture, partnerships, and environments needed to turn learning, research and ideas into real-world impact within the context of the Manchester 2035 strategy.

One question I raised was, how do we mitigate the inherent risks to employers, students and staff associated with partnerships? What are the resources needed to make partnerships work at scale and who is going to provide and manage them? Part of the answer is, to manage expectations about what is required of partnerships and what they can deliver in practice.

How much is ITL actually like Glastonbury festival?

So, back to our festival analogy. How similar is the ITL conference to a musical event like Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts?


Figure 6: How much are conferences like festivals? They have some similarities but many differences. CC BY-SA picture of crowd gathered at Glastonbury Festival by Czampal via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/SgyH

There are some similarities between Glastonbury festival (figure 6) and the ITL conference:

  • They both involve performers trying to connect with their audience on multiple stages of various sizes. Some performances were better than others, some of the artists you’ve probably heard of, many of them will be new to you
  • There is too much at both events to see in the short time available, seven parallel tracks at ITL and hundreds of stages at Glastonbury. This is a feature not a bug!
  • It’s better to attend the live event if you can, festivals and conferences are about the experience of being there and joining in the conversation, rather than catching up later, but see the Zoom note below.
  • Just like it’s easy too find some new music you like at Glastonbury, you’ll make lots of new connections with your colleagues at ITL, be exposed to some inspiring pedagogy that you can take away and use in your practice afterwards

But there are significant differences between them, because a conference isn’t like festival in lots of ways:

  • The ITL conference is free to attend for UoM employees whereas Glastonbury requires you to take out a bank loan or remortgage your house in order to buy a ticket, provided you can even get hold of one.
  • While there was lots fun to be had at the ITL conference, festivals are mostly about recreation whereas conferences are mostly about work. There is no music, there was no stage diving, crowd surfing, piggy-backing, camping and home-made flag-waving commonly found at music festivals, at least not in the sessions I attended! Maybe we should change this next year?
  • If you want to get up on stage and tell everyone about your work, that’s probably easier to do at the ITL conference than Glastonbury festival, unless you’re already an established superstar with a record deal, back catalogue and huge fanbase
  • If you’d like to get involved in ITL in 2027, there are lots of positions available on the organising committee and peer review panels, contact the organisers for details
  • The food is much better at ITL than Glastonbury. I thought the food was good, much better than over-priced junk fast food you find at music festivals from mobile vendors.
  • The toilets are much better at ITL than Glastonbury! Thankfully there are no long drops or portaloos, just well managed and clean facilities provided by the University. When you go home after the event you can have a proper shower and sleep in a decent bed. Phew!

So ITL is like a musical festival in some ways but not in lots of others.

How can ITL be better in 2027?

I thoroughly enjoyed the ITL conference, I’ve been every year for the last four years and I always meet interesting new people doing great projects, as well as catching up with old friends and getting the chance to share and reflect on my own practice. It was really refreshing to see members of the University executive team at the conference taking part this year. They didn’t just make a token appearance and then leave shortly after. The executive team took the time to listen to what people are talking about and contributed to the dialogue. Thanks to Duncan Ivison, Patrick Hackett, John Holden, Eleanor Morrissey FCIPD MA and Jenn Hallam for properly joining in.

Figure 7:The Dimensions of Activities Related to Teaching (DART), note the PUBLIC dimension, an important feature of scholarship is PUBLIC-ation. Image adapted from [3]

I’d like ITL to carry on growing and improving year on year, a bit like Glastonbury has done since starting in 1970. In order to continue growing, the ITL conference needs to:

  • Publish more of the proceedings. The abstract book [1] is handy, but it captures a small fraction of the data and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) from the conference. Authors should be publishing their slides too, figshare.manchester.ac.uk would be a relatively easy way to do that. Once authors have their paper accepted for publication, they could upload it to the repository, see an example at [2]. Scholarship is not really public if it isn’t a fully published PUBLIC-ation! An abstract is necessary but not sufficient, see figure 7.
  • Tell us where the catchup is: When you miss an act at Glastonbury, you can catch-up later on BBC iPlayer bbc.co.uk/glastonbury. Some of the ITL talks were streamed using Zoom, but if they were recorded, I can’t find them published anywhere. There are a few I would liked to have seen from the 85% of the conference I wasn’t able to attend, speaking of which…
  • Zoom out because we should stop using Zoom, we’ll probably be forced to next year anyway when IT services follow through on their warning about switching to Teams by the end of 2026. Some combination of meetings, webinars, and town halls on Microsoft Teams / 365 should do the trick – and this means there’s no more tedious zoom logins to worry about.
  • Anonymously peer-review As the conference grows, it gets harder to get your paper accepted. More submissions are great, and will hopefully increase the quality of the conference to. But quantity is harder to manage, especially when its anonymously peer reviewed. There are good, free and cheap tools to do this like EasyChair see easychair.org. A Microsoft form populating an Excel spreadsheet isn’t adequate for managing conference proceedings on this scale – and it means the peer review is not anonymous.
  • Help us scale it up. It’s great to hear about innovative pedagogy which often occurs in small classes of less than 30 students. Much of our teaching at the University of Manchester involves classes much much bigger than that. it’s not unusual for classes to have between 300 and 500 students in first and second year. So a key question is, not just how do we teach innovatively, but how do we innovate at scale?
  • Increase attendance and participation. Many colleagues don’t seem to know that ITL happening. Others aren’t willing or able to attend. While it was reassuring to see Pavlos Petoumenos and Stewart Blakeway, many of my Computer Science colleagues who would have attended were absent. For example, neither our Discipline Head of Education (DHoE) Andrea Schalk or Teaching & Learning Enhancement Lead (TLEL) Gareth Henshall have been able to attend any of the last FOUR conferences because it clashes with exam boards in Computer Science. These dates are fixed a long time in advance of the ITL conference. I might have missed them, but I didn’t see anyone from the Department of Physics and Astronomy (random example) – do they even know it is happening? Anna Scaife for example, is publishing lots of interesting positive (and evidence based) material on independent learning for undergraduate students at howtobeastudent.substack.com. Why aren’t there more people like Anna at the ITL conference?

So ITL is great, but there’s plenty of room for improvement next year.

Thanks Jenni, Hannah, Sarah, Holly, Freya and Nahid

If my criticism comes across as being ungrateful, I’m trying to be a constructive and critical friend so we can put on an even better event on next year. I’m very grateful to the huge team of people that worked extremely hard to make the conference happen again. Thanks Jennie Blake, Hannah Cobb, Sarah Dyer, Freya Corrywright, Holly Dewsnip, Nahid Farzalizadeh and many more for putting on another fantastic event. Thanks also to the photographer who took most of the photos that I’ve used to illustrate this report.

I look forward to ITL returning in 2027, hope to see you there. In the meantime, join us at the Teaching and Scholarship Network (TaSN), we’re a friendly bunch and our members include inspiring people like Karen Lander, Rachel Studd, Nick Weise PFHEA IFNTF, Reimala Sivalingam, Sally Hickson, Lindsey Jones, Thomas Rodgers, Grazyna (Grace) Lipowska-Bhalla, PhD, SFHEA, Anna Goatman, Ali Owrak, Dr Rachel Parker-Strak, Doron Cohen, David Schultz, Nikesh Solanki and many more.

Come and join us! We organise and host regular events throughout the year about the Scholarship of Teaching & Learing (SoTL), in between the big Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL) annual event.

References

  1. Jennie Blake (2026) University of Manchester Teaching and Learning Conference 2026 (Abstract Booklet) figshare DOI:10.48420/32802033
  2. Duncan Hull, Suzanne Embury, Tom Carroll, Christopher Page and Ben Possible (2026) Partner-enabled learning with local and global software engineers from Manchester to the world, Figshare DOI:10.48420/32745048.v2
  3. Beth Kern, Gwendolyn Mettetal, Marcia D. Dixson, and Robin K. Morgan (2015) The Role of SoTL in the Academy:Upon the 25th Anniversary of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered Journal of the Scholarship for Teaching and Learning, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 1 – 14. doi: 10.14434/josotl.v15i3.13623

This post is also published at linkedin.com/pulse/celebrating-teaching-learning-glastonbury-festival-2026-hull–dvjae

July 4, 2026

Thanks to everyone who helped me graduate today

Filed under: education — Duncan Hull @ 4:29 pm
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Today is the 4th July, a day for celebrating independence. Alongside those who graduated with me in the Whitworth Building, I’m celebrating independence. Not national independence marked by independence days around the world, but independence of thinking and independence of learning. These are two of the most important things and education can give you. I’m grateful to have received these gifts from my teachers and fellow students.

Figure 1: Shaking hands with Tony Trinci at a graduation ceremony in the Whitworth Building at the University of Manchester on 4th July

Studying any subject for an extended period of time can give you two things that help you become more independent.

  1. Better critical thinking skills, since it’s the 4th July, let’s call “critical thinking” free and independent thinking skills. Raise a glass to freedom, something they can never take away.
  2. Bigger and more diverse social networks of friends, professionals, mentors, peers, role-models, task masters, teachers, influencers, experts, leaders, colleagues and collaborators that you meet in the communities you are part of. The teams you join at University are likely to be bigger and more diverse than those you were previously a member of.

If you’re graduating this year, you might be wondering what all those years of study were all about, particularly now that you’ve finally got some time to properly digest and reflect on your experience.

What was that all about? Are you stuffed? Was it worth it?

Studying anything is a like having a large meal. When you finish, you feel so full that couldn’t eat another thing, not even a wafer thin mint. Instead of having a bellyful of food, your head is crammed full of ideas that you learned in labs, lectures and across campus, from the whole community around you. Some of these ideas are quickly digested, others take longer. They all become a part of you.

Nourishing mother is a phrase used to describe what every University does, usually expressed in latin: alma mater. Our metaphorical mothers should be plural and neutral, not singular and gendered because we are nourished by many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents and so on. There’s a whole intellectual family around us in education, so alma familia: nourishing family, would be a more accurate description of what Universities, colleges and schools are actually doing.

If you’re graduating now, you might not feel like eating any more, but you can always come back later in the restaurant of lifelong learning when your hunger returns. There’s always something new on the menu, some “dish” you haven’t tried yet. The door is always open to learning and it doesn’t have to be in academia, you’ll learn just as much in the workplace.

Figure 2: Sat in the audience with my bestie Chris listening to Tony Trinci talk about student-staff ratios. I wonder what he’d make of the ratios and numbers today?

Thanks, plant scientists for your nature and nurture

My undergraduate degree is a BSc (Hons) Applied Plant Sciences, when you tell people that, the usual reaction is WTF? [1] The Applied bit is what the University now calls Industrial or Professional Experience (IE), as part its drive towards more Partner-Enabled Learning in the Manchester 2035 strategy. The discipline of Plant Sciences used to be called Botany, but since that usually invokes images of skipping through meadows, pressing flowers and speaking Latin binomials, it’s usually known as Plant Sciences because that sounds more modern. We did skip through meadows and press flowers, which I can thoroughly recommend, but it was only 10 credits out of 360 total. The rest of the degree studied the growth, reproduction and evolution of plant life at every level from the molecular, biochemical, genetic and cellular through to physiological and ecological over the last 3.5 billion years of life on earth.

Another way of describing what a degree means is to thank all the people who taught it. So, thanks to Tony Trinci (microbiology), Bob Callow (Genetics), Jackie Potter (final year project supervisor), Liz Sheffield (botany), Joan Watson (palaeobotany) [2], Keith Gull (molecular biology), Amanda Bamford (physiology), Laurence Cook (genetics), Robin Baker (evolutionary biology), Sean Edwards (systematics & taxonomy), John Lee (ecology), John Tallis (ecology), Michael Emes (biochemistry), Caroline Bowsher (biochemistry), Cliff Bray (biochemistry), Allan G. Lowe (biochemistry), Roland Ennos (biomechanics), Phil Harris (placement year), Malcolm Press CBE (ecology), David Sigee (botany), Harry Epton, Dick Benton, Robert W. Foster (computational biology), Fred Rumsey. Thanks to all the teachers whose names I can’t remember. This is slightly embarrassing but it was a while ago! The unknown lecturer from the Department of Mathematics taught us differential calculus and statistics. Some more cell biologists & geneticists from first year are a hazy memory, an economist from Humanities at The University of Manchester taught us some environmental and agricultural economics. An army of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and technicians made the labs work. There were lots of wet labs in vivo and in vitro, with a few computer labs in silico and some field trips too. Then there’s all those administrators in the back office who kept the wheels turning. Different people are affected by different teachers in different ways. For me, out of all the teachers above, those that had the biggest influence on me were:

  • Tony Trinci (1936-2020) Pro-Vice-Chancellor (PVC) at The University of Manchester, pictured above. Leaders are often sharp people and some leading Professors have sharp elbows and sharp tongues to accompany their sharp minds. Not Tony. He was approachable and treated students with kindness, patience and respect, while also being a razor-sharp leader in his field of mycology. Thanks Tony and RIP.
  • Liz Sheffield: Associate PVC and Emeritus Professor and Dean at the University of Liverpool. Liz successfully drilled into many undergraduates like me the importance of written English, not just as a tool for communication but as a tool for thinking. Some of this was done using the Biological Sciences Review a magazine distributed to thousands of A-level students across the UK and beyond. Liz lead a fantastic course called Photosynthetic Organisms where we used microscopes to study alien lifeforms like Volvox, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and many more weird and wonderful creatures. She also supervised my dissertation on how cells know their arse from the elbow which went by the more scientific title of Signal Transduction During Embryogenesis in Fucoid Algae. [3] It’s one of the pieces of work I was most proud of, largely because Liz gave me honest, personalised, timely and constructive feedback on it. She also ran a final year course unit in the style of a journal club, which was a big revelation for me – another aha! moment. This was the inspiration for UK ACM SIGCSE journal club, we meet on the first Monday of every month, join us at uki-sigcse.acm.org/journal-club. Thanks again Liz.
  • Michael Emes: Emeritus Professor at the University of Guelph near Toronto in Canada. When a subject gets difficult and technical, as biochemistry sometimes does, it can be tempting to dumb it down to make it more accessible for learners. Making a subject easier might improve your course evaluations, National Student Survey (NSS) scores and your institutions ranking in the endless jockeying of league tables. Mike Emes never did this with his teaching, and his labs were great, particularly the experimental study of an antiporter known as the triose phosphate translocator, an important membrane protein crucial to energy flow in chloroplasts. [4] This was authentic assessment at its very best, hard work and challenging, but worth the effort required of students and teachers alike. Learning is hard, and sometimes you’re going to have to suffer. There aren’t many short cuts that are worth taking. Thanks Michael for not taking short cuts.
  • Malcolm Press: Vice Chancellor of The Manchester Metropolitan University. Ecologists like Malcolm often go on interesting field trips and sometimes they take you with them. Malcolm led field trips and residentials to the Mediterranean and sub-arctic which were life changing experiences for many students including me. Thanks Malcolm.
  • Jackie Potter: Dean of Academic Innovation at the University of Chester. I was a humble field assistant to Jackie’s postdoc research at Abisko Scientific Research Station in sub-arctic Sweden which was run by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. This was by far and away one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. Jackie had the unglamorous job of supervising my employment, reading my final year project report and giving me feedback. Thanks Jackie. [5]
  • Phil Harris: Emeritus Professor of Plant Science, Centre for Agroecology and Food Security at Coventry University, now retired. Phil supervised my placement year in industry. As an adolescent [6] I had a lot of growing up to do when I was an undergraduate and I did some of that growing up during my placement year which was hosted by Phil and his colleagues at the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA), affiliated to Coventry University and now known as Garden Organic. Thanks Phil.
  • Robin Baker: (1944-2026). There is no shortage of independent and free-thinking academics with bold ideas in what has become the The University of Manchester Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health (FBMH). One of them was Robin, he lead popular courses on the crazy bonkers world of behavioural ecology. Thanks Robin and RIP, so long and thanks for all the sperm wars. [7]

Thanks to my family, especially my parents. Thanks to my alma familia too – all my fellow students, can’t name them all here but Christopher Gilbert, Lucy Harris, Guy Hanke, Erica McAlister, Paul Taplin CEng MIMechE, Rupert Blackstone, Clare Roebuck DipM MCIM, Hannah, Steph, Andy, Zoe, Alistair, Vanessa, Andy (BUNAC ambassador), Rebecca, Emily, Amy, Nick and Merc from the Mountaineering & Climbing club. Thanks to Helena, Terry Callaghan, Mats Sonesson, Nils-Åke Andersson, Rosie, Nick, Dylan, Karin, Kjell, Lennart, Marion, Martin, Ulf from Abisko Naturvetenskapliga (ANS) now run by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat . Why name all these people? Again? Gratitude goes a long way to improving everybody’s mental health but there’s another reason expressing gratitude matters:

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known” —Chuck Palahniuk Invisible Monsters [2]

So thanks to all my teachers for your combined efforts.

Lessons to younger students, graduands and graduates

A question I like asking students of all ages is to imagine that Chris parkes in the Department of Physics and Astronomy has lent us his colleagues experimental time travel machine and assured us that it works. Using this machine to meet their former selves, what would advice would they offer? What have they learned during their course? Everyone gives an interesting and different answer, so here’s mine:

  • Grades don’t matter as much to employers as you probably think they do. Like many students, I had an unhealthy, toxic, abusive and dysfunctional relationship with grades. Having spent the first half of the degree pretending not to care about grades, I spent the latter half of the degree caring far too much about them. A better strategy would have been to strike a healthier balance between caring and not caring, whatever the degree classification you’re after. Remember that many employers are significantly less interested in your grades than you are. Congratulations on whatever grade you’ve achieved but remember employers want to know WHO you are and what SKILLS you have learned and can offer alongside your specialist knowledge. Grades give employers a glimpse of some of that, but only a glimpse, as Bryan Mathers at Visual Thinkery puts it you are MUCH more than your grades.Never stop networking and learning from your peers. Learning has both social and solitary dimensions. For the social part, keep learning from everyone around you, deliberately and frequently, learning on the job, mentoring (or being mentored), managing (or being managed), study buddies, revision groups, peer support and peer learning, call it what you want. It’s all good. The medics call it see one, do one, teach one but this phenomenon extends far beyond the medical profession. [9] Graduation ceremonies are a great opportunity to refresh connections with peers you might not see again for a while, especially the weaker ties described in Coding Your Future [10]Extra-curriculars and experience are what make you unique – they also have the added bonus of being good for your mental health and wellbeing too. I’d done a tonne of extra-curriculars, but not fully realised their value personally or professionally. With two summer internships, a year in industry and a gap year, student societies like the British Universities North America Club 🇺🇸BUNAC and the Mountaineering & Climbing Club, I’d filled my boots with extra-curriculars because they were interesting and fun. I wasn’t thinking about polishing my CV, but it was all the extra-curricular activities that helped me build skills and knowledge you can’t get from formal academic study and helped job applications stand out later. Anything extra-curricular will distinguish you from the crowd. When you’re applying for graduate jobs, all of your competitors will have a degree of some sort, so what makes you different? Any side projects, hobbies, societies and experiences, including casual or part-time work are a key part of who you are. They are a crucial part of what you have to offer employers and how you can look after your mental health when facing a demanding workload.It can take years to fully digest whatever skills and knowledge you’re trying to learn, so reflect deliberately and frequently and be patient. Some lessons take time, some lessons are painful, humiliating, emotionally challenging or intellectually demanding. You might not be ready for them yet. You might not even realise what you’ve actually learned until you reflect on it because learning can happen slowly when you’re not looking, like sedimentation.

Three good diagnostic questions to ask yourself as your years of education settle are:

  1. How have you become more independent?
  2. Who in your professional and social networks can help you make the next moves in your career?
  3. Who is in your alma familia and what do you have to thank them for? Expressing your gratitude doesn’t have to take the form of a social-media-friendly, clickbait-optimised, attention-seeking and gushing LinkedIn post, like this one. Sometimes personalised and private thank you’s are more appropriate.

If you’re graduating this year, congratulations, best wishes and bon voyage for the next moves of your journey. If you’re graduating from The University of Manchester, check out the services on offer to graduates. If you’d like to use the careers service, they are available for you up to two years after you graduate: make sure update your contact email before your @manchester.ac.uk account is deleted at the end of July. See careers.manchester.ac.uk/graduates. 🎓

Independent time travel

The TODAY is the title of this article is not 4th July 2026, or even the 4th July 1776, but the 4th July 1996, I got here using a time-travel machine and a hole in the space-time continuum called the The University of Manchester Graduation Archive YouTube channel. There is footage here every year stretching back to 1987. The screenshot above is taken from this video: youtube.com/watch?v=tfF43_2i2XQ&t=1658s

Figure 3: Happy 250th anniversary to the class of 1776. Results from your class have been mixed. Raise and glass to freedom, something they can never take away, no matter what they tell you, let’s have another round tonight. Public domain image of the United States Semiquincentennial logo by Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/HGZ3

Thanks to Julian Skyrme for pointing out the graduation archive which captures the Happy Days of the Summer of ’96, and many others. Back in the summer of ’96. Woah Yeah!

References

  1. Mary Williams (2009) Why Study Plants? The Plant Cell. 21 (10) Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) doi.org/cwk56d (TL;DR “Plants provide us with oxygen, food, medicine, energy and materials. Scientists study plants to improve and secure the food supply for an increasing world population, identify new sources of medicines, improve production of materials and identify sources of biofuels and renewable resources. Studying plants increases our knowledge about life in general and helps us to work with them to keep us fed, healthy, sheltered, clothed, entertained and happy.”)
  2. Joan Watson (2005) One hundred and fifty years of palaeobotany at Manchester University, Geological Society of London, Special Publications, Volume 241, Pages 229 – 257 DOI:10.1144/GSL.SP.2003.207.01.16
  3. Duncan Hull (1995) Signal Transduction During Embryogenesis in Fucoid Algae, BS304 dissertation, School of Biological Sciences, University of Manchester.
  4. David Walker (1992) Energy, Plants and Man, Oxgraphics Limited, Brighton, Sussex. ISBN:1870232054
  5. Jacqueline A. Potter, Malcolm C. Press, Terry V. Callaghan, and John A. Lee. (1995). “Growth Responses of Polytrichum commune and Hylocomium splendens to Simulated Environmental Change in the Sub-Arctic.” New Phytologist 131 (4): 533–41. (I get name-checked in the acknowledgements, the first time I’m mentioned in any scientific literature, woohoo!) DOI:10.1111/j.1469-8137.1995.tb03089.x
  6. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (2019) Inventing ourselves: The secret life of the teenage Brain, Black Swan, London, ISBN:9781784161347 (Sarah argues that adolescence extends beyond our teenage years and into our twenties)
  7. Robin Baker (1996) Sperm Wars: Infidelity, sexual conflict and other bedroom battles, Fourth Estate, London, ISBN:9781857023565 (Some plants have motile sperm too, not the confusingly named Spermatophytes but Bryophytes, Pteridophytes, Ginkgos and Cycads.)
  8. Chuck Palahniuk (1999) Invisible Monsters, Vintage, London: ISBN:9780099285441 (From the author of Fight Club)
  9. Grainne Kearney, Nick Gardiner, Davina Carr, Martina Kelly, Gerard J Gormley, (2025) See one, do one, teach one: other professionals don’t accept this so why should the medical profession? BMJ 2025; 389 DOI:10.1136/bmj.r432
  10. Duncan Hull (2026) Coding Your Future: A guidebook for students, cdyf.me, University of Manchester
  11. Bryan Adams (1984) Summer of ’69 in Reckless. A&M Records. “I got my first real six-string, bought it at the five and dime. Played it ’til my fingers bled, was the summer of ’69… Those were the best days of my life”

This articles is also available at linkedin.com/pulse/thank-you-everybody-who-helped-me-graduate-today-duncan-hull–dxq2e

Figure 4: In case you’re wondering how I remembered all those names, I didn’t remember all of them. I had some help from the handbooks above. Note the change of logo midway through the degree, its changed again since, with another change on the way. More logo changes than the BBC?

May 5, 2026

Why is Learning So Challenging?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Duncan Hull @ 10:35 pm
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There are plenty of reasons that learning is challenging but there’s one reason that really stands out: feedback. We learn more efficiently when we can get timely, constructive and personalised feedback on our work from somebody who knows what they are talking about. Whatever you are learning, in the finite time you are learning it, answering these three questions will provide feedback to help you progress:

  1. Which skills and knowledge should have the highest priority in your life (both curricular and extra-curricular)?
  2. What skills and knowledge are you learning best and how do you know you are making progress?
  3. What skills and knowledge do you need to improve and how are you going to learn them?

These simple questions often give complex feedback that consumes time and resources, both of which are in limited supply for you and the community that teaches you. You can’t always get what you want, when you need it. That’s why learning is so difficult.

Hosts and winners of the University of Manchester Students’ Union (UMSU) Awards 2026 on stage in the Whitworth Building.

Teaching is Really Challenging Too

If learning is really challenging then it shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that teaching is really challenging too, for the exactly the same reasons. Like you, your teachers are only human (honest!) and we make mistakes – I’m sure you’ve noticed. We’ll be more likely to learn from our mistakes if we can get timely, constructive, actionable and personalised feedback from students. We ask ourselves the same three questions above to help us make progress, but like you, our time is finite as well so:

  1. Which knowledge and skills should we give the highest priority to in our teaching? Where do they fit inside, alongside and outside of curricula?
  2. What skills and knowledge are we teaching best and how will we know when our students are making sufficient progress?
  3. What skills and knowledge do we need to teach better and how are we going to assess them?

Right across the higher education sector, it’s a struggle to get feedback on teaching, positive or negative. Students are very busy, have higher priorities, suffer from endless survey fatigue and don’t always recognise the value of giving constructive feedback. Disengaged students don’t believe that their feedback will be listened to or acted on. All of this results in unit surveys that typically have response rates so embarrassingly low (less than 1%) that some UK Universities have abandoned using them completely. The tiny amount of data they provide is often meaningless, distorted and unreliable. Yet Universities continue to use them to assess the quality of their teaching and inform decisions about promotions.

So it’s really reassuring to get positive feedback when we are teaching things well. Thanks to the anonymous students who nominated and voted for me for the Excellence in Embedding Employability in the Curriculum award. I almost blubbed uncontrollably on stage like Gwyneth Paltrow when this nomination text was read out by Freya Weetch: 😭

“Duncan Hull is an outstanding Employability Lead who goes above and beyond to prepare students for the world of work. From connecting students with industry to creating exciting opportunities and careers events, he inspires confidence and ambition at every step. His energy, dedication, and genuine passion for student success have made a huge impact, empowering students to step boldly into their future careers. ”

Those very kind and moving words from an anonymous student will help me stay motivated and remind me why I get out of bed in the morning. Thanks to Alexandra (Lexie) Baynes, Krystyna Drewenska, Freya Weetch, Alec Severs, Amrit Dhillon, Bo Ana Murphy, Ben Ward, Katie Jackson and everyone at the University of Manchester Students’ Union (UMSU) for hosting these events, past and present. It felt appropriate to receive this award in the magnificent Whitworth Building where thousands of former students like me have graduated accompanied by their friends, supporters and families. It was also an opportunity to speak in front of the senior leadership of the The University of Manchester including Duncan Ivison, Jenn Hallam, Peter Green, Colette Fagan – thanks to Andrew Mawdsley for recording my fifteen seconds of fame. 🙏

Congratulations and jubilations to my fellow nominees and laureates: Hanan El-Wandi, The Diversify Politics Society, Dr. Pietro Paolo Frigenti, SFHEA, CMktr, The University of Manchester Women In Business Society, The University of Manchester Neurology and Neurosurgery Society, Alejandra Vicente Colmenares, Transforming Assessment Together, Breaking the Barrier to Let a Voice Out, Lei Zeng, The Inclusive Classroom Project, Alan Davies, Harsath Udayakumar, Vuyo Dube, Maria-Michaela Vierita, Matt Dalgliesh, Yuxin Yan, Abdelrahman Shaaban, Ishnoor Kaur, Fiona Chan, Anahita Jayaram, Christian N. Nwosu, Brogan Pritchard, Md Faisal Mahmud, Adella Tobing, The North West Biotech Initiative, Laura Swain, Adam Danquah, The University of Manchester Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health Maria Mercè Canal, Sohini Biswas, Carl M. Kulimushi, Anna Hood, PhD, Sam Rodgers, Louisa Shirley, Samhita Mukherjee, Lorraine Brobbey, Clara Dawson, Danny Dresner FCIIS, Doron Cohen, Neil Morrison, Saralees Nadarajah, Alison Hassett, Abdullatif Alfutimie, Venus Muscat, Stephen Craig, Sam Thozer, Mariangela D’Acri, Abbie Jones, Hala Shokr, Michele Caprio, Paul Tobin and Dr. Miri Firth PFHEA. Special thanks to Miri wooping loudly and gratifyingly when the winner was announced. 🏆

What was it Andy Warhol said? “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes seconds”. Enjoying my fifteen seconds of fame (top left) during evening in the Whitworth Building (top right) for an award (bottom right). Thanks again UMSU

Teaching is a team sport, not an individual one. Teaching professional skills by embedding employability in the curriculum is no different, we’ve had ongoing help from a large team of people from industry and academia. I’d like to thank the employers in our industry club, particularly Apple, Arm, Booking.com, BNY the BBC, Bloomberg, Couchbase, IBM, Apadmi, Matillion, Bet365, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, SeeChange Technologies, Morgan Stanley, Roku and many other members of our industry-club.cs.manchester.ac.uk who’ve helped us run a range of events for students in Computer Science. Many of these events have been organised in collaboration with our fantastic student societies UniCS Manchester, The Manchester Intelligence Society (MIS), The Manchester AI Society, RoboSoc (University of Manchester Robotics Society) and MathSoc Manchester who remind us what the joy of learning as part of a community is all about.

They’ve been a key part of what we’ve managed to offer students alongside Coding Your Future, the Wednesday Waggle with help from Imago Software (with Suzanne Embury), the Masood Entrepreneurship Centre (with Dan Syder) and UoM alumni. None of this would have been possible without ongoing support from my colleagues. Thanks to everyone who leads and delivers on the Herculean task our teaching and assessment Paul Nutter, Andrew Stewart, Steve Pettifer, Gareth Henshall, Stewart Blakeway, Louise Walker, David Petrescu, Sean Bechhofer, Uli Sattler, Andrea Schalk, Markel Vigo, Bijan Parsia, Toby Howard, Afrodite Galata, Tom Carroll, Chris Page and everyone else in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester. 🐝

We’ve also been supported by Professional Services (PS) staff across the University, particularly Mabel Yau, Ruth Maddocks, Cameron Macdonald, Lisa Wright, Nanna Pedley, Caroline Whitehand, Penney Gordon-Lanes, Ben Carter, Amanda Conway, Helen Frost, Anna Lomas, Jenny Sloan, Kelly-Ann Mallon and everyone in the careers service.

Our teaching and research in Computer Science is part of something bigger, that students don’t really see directly: the School of Engineering (SoE) and The University of Manchester Faculty of Science and Engineering. Thanks to leadership and management from academics and administrators alike, including Sarah Cartmell, Sarah Sharples CBE FREng, Carly Peesapati, Akilu Yunusa-Kaltungo (PhD CEng FIMechE FHEA) and many more.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank the Teaching and Scholarship Network (TaSN) who help all staff across the University to improve the quality of teaching and learning, wherever they work and whatever they do. The TaSN is led by Hannah Cobb and Jenni Rose NTF PFHEA with help from Eleanor Aspey, Helen Baxter, Elaine Clark, Karen Lander, Jen McBride, Dr Rachel Parker-Strak, Thomas Rodgers, Reimala Sivalingam, Rachel Studd, Lisa Taylor, Holly Dewsnip and Nick Weise PFHEA IFNTF. If you care about improving teaching, you should come and join us in the TaSN. We host regular events online and in person which anyone from The University of Manchester (and beyond) is welcome to join. Our next TaSN meeting is Thursday 7th May, see the Teaching and Scholarship Network (TaSN).

You can find out more about the UMSU awards, which continue this week with the Arts and Media Awards on Thursday 7th May at manchesterstudentsunion.com/awards.

The UMSU awards continue on Thursday the 7th May 2026 ❤️

(You can cite this article using its full Digital Object Identifier DOI:10.59350/1y79e-6mn80 or the shorter doi.org/q6bx, both of which identify the same article. A modified version of this article is available at linkedin.com/pulse/why-learning-so-challenging-duncan-hull–i4qlc)

July 30, 2021

Join us to discuss when study turns digital on Monday 2nd August at 2pm BST

Filed under: Uncategorized — Duncan Hull @ 8:44 am
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Public domain image of Coronavirus by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins at CDC.gov on Wikimedia commons w.wiki/ycs

The pandemic has accelerated changes to the way we teach and learn. Join us to discuss the Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure: a paper by Vegard Gjerde, Robert Gray, Bodil Holst and Stein Dankert Kolstø on the effects of the pandemic on Physics Education at a Norwegian University. [1]

In March 2020, universities in Norway and many other countries shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The students lost access to classrooms, libraries, study halls, and laboratories. Studying turned digital. Because it is unclear when this pandemic will cease to affect students and because we cannot know whether or when a new pandemic occurs, we need to find ways to improve digital study-life for students. An important step in this direction is to understand the students’ experiences and perspectives regarding how the digitalization affected their study-life both in structured learning arenas and their self-study. Therefore, we interviewed 12 students in an introductory mechanics course at a Norwegian university in June of 2020. Through a thematic analysis, we identified four broad categories in the students’ different experiences and reflections, namely that digitalization: (a) provides benefits, e.g. the flexibility inherent in online video lectures; (b) incurs learning costs, e.g. students reducing their study effort; (c) incurs social costs, e.g. missing being around other students; and (d) increases the need for structure, e.g. wanting to be arranged in digital groups to solve mandatory tasks. We also found that the 2019 students on average scored significantly better on the final exam than the 2020 students, d = 0.31, but we discuss why this result should be interpreted with caution. We provide suggestions for how to adapt courses to make students’ digital studying more socially stimulating and effective. Furthermore, this study is a contribution to the historical documentation of the Covid-19 pandemic.

All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on Zoom see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details. Thanks to Sarah Clinch for suggesting the paper.

References

  1. Gjerde, Vegard; Gray, Robert; Holst, Bodil; Kolstø, Stein Dankert (2021). “The Covid-19 shutdown: when studying turns digital, students want more structure”. Physics Education. 56 (5): 055004. doi:10.1088/1361-6552/ac031e

March 15, 2013

Creating with the Raspberry Pi vs. Consuming Apple Pie at the Manchester Raspberry Jamboree

Filed under: education,engineering,mathematics,Science,technology — Duncan Hull @ 10:31 am
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

MiniGirlGeek

Thirteen year old Amy Mather aka @MiniGirlGeek steals the show at Manchester Raspberry Jam 2013

Last Saturday, the first ever Raspberry Jamboree rolled into town, organised by the unstoppable force of nature that is Alan O’Donohoe (aka @teknoteacher). The jamboree looked at the educational value of the Raspberry Pi (a $25 computer) one year on from its launch on the the 29th February 2012. Here are some brief and incomplete notes on some of the things that happened in the main room, aka ‘Jamboree Central’. The workshops and other events have been covered by Jason Barnett @boeeerb.

A key feature of the Raspberry Pi foundation (and the Jamboree) was neatly summed up by Paul Beech (aka @guru) who compared the Raspberry Pi to various Apple iThings. Paul’s view is that when it comes to computing, Apple gives you a “sandy beach, sunbed and cocktail” to passively consume digital content with while the Raspberry Pi gives you a “desert, knife and a bottle” to actively create new things (see his tweet below).

Consuming Apple Pie on a sandy beach, with a sunbed and a cocktail

Engineering evangelist Rob Bishop used Apple Inc. to illustrate what the Raspberry Pi is about in his talk ‘one year on‘. Rob pointed out that a huge amount of effort at Apple Inc. is put into making Computing invisible and seamless. This is great if you’re consuming content on your iPad or iPhone, and what many users want – easy to use, with all the nasty internal gubbins tucked away, out of sight. This is tasty Californian Apple Pie, which many of consume in large amounts.

However, invisible computing is a problem for education, because it is difficult to demonstrate the Wonders of Computer Science (Brian Cox’s next TV series) with a device like the iPad.  Many of the internals of modern devices are completely inaccessible, and it’s non-trivial for budding young engineers to build anything very interesting with it particularly quickly.

In contrast, the Raspberry Pi can be challenging to setup, just getting the Operating System up and running isn’t always straightforward. However, there’s a ton of interesting stuff you can build with it: Nifty robotics, bionic bird boxes, musical hackery, twittering chickens, live train departure boards, internet radios, singing jelly babies and loads of other pideas. Try doing that with your iPad…

Creating with Raspberry Pi in the desert, using a knife and a bottle

Most of the jamboree focussed not on Apple but on the things that can be created with Raspberry Pi: the What and Why and When And How and Where and Who with keynotes from Steve Furber [1] and talks and panel sessions from:

A highlight of the jamboree was the closing keynote given by the thirteen year old Mini Girl Geek on what she’s been doing with her Raspberry Pi. MiniGirlGeek (aka Amy Mather pictured above) stole the show with her demo implementations of Conway’s Game of Life in Python. [update: see video below]

What’s interesting is that Conway’s Game of Life is used as an exercise for first year undergraduates in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. So it’s great to see teenagers mastering the “knife” of Raspberry Pi, and reminds us that Raspberry Pi is no “sunbed and cocktail” but with a little patience, ambition and talent there’s plenty to capture the imagination of young people about Computing.

References

  1. Steve Furber et al (2012). Computing in Schools: Shut down or restart? Royal Society Report

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