Maura Murphy

The Writing Consultation: Developing Academic Writing Practices.

This article describes and analyses a specific mechanism, the writing consultation, designed to help academics to prioritise, reconceptualise and improve their writing practices. It makes the case for its potential to stimulate consideration of writing practices and motivations, a possible precondition for creating time for writing in academic contexts. This article proposes that the process of revealing and developing writing practices in a specific form of regular, structured, collegial discussion has potential to prompt academics to reconceptualise their writing practices and, perhaps crucially, to find different ways to write. In addition, it demonstrates, in a new way, how recognised behaviour change strategies might be embedded in the academic writing process. The writing consultation draws on principles established in other contexts. This article makes the case for adapting them to the context of academic writing, in order to support and improve academic writing output.

Online student evaluations of teaching: what are we sacrificing for the affordances of technology?

In the context of increased emphasis on quality assurance of teaching, it is crucial that student evaluations of teaching (SET) methods be both reliable and workable in practice. Online SETs particularly tend to raise criticisms with those most reactive to mechanisms of teaching accountability. However, most studies of SET processes have been conducted with convenience, small and cross-sectional samples. Longitudinal studies are rare, as comparison studies on SET methodological approaches are generally pilot studies followed shortly after by implementation. The investigation presented here significantly contributes to the debate by examining the impact of the online administration method of SET on a very large longitudinal sample at the course level rather than attending to the student unit, thus compensating for the inter-dependency of students’ responses according to the instructor variable. It explores the impact of the administration method of SET (paper based in-class vs. out-of-class online collection) on scores, with a longitudinal sample of over 63,000 student responses collected over a total period of 10 years. Having adjusted for the confounding effect of class size, faculty, year of evaluation, years of teaching experience and student performance, it is observed that the actual effect of the administration method exists, but is insignificant.

Helping academics to write: experiences and insights from a writers retreat

This paper describes the initiation of an annual ‘writers retreat’ at the University of Limerick. The purpose, format and outcomes of this initiative are discussed and explored. In addition, the learning and teaching implications and the link between learning and teaching and research are discussed. The initiative reported in this paper was open to all disciplines at the University of Limerick. However, it would be possible to adopt/ adapt this type of exercise for specific disciplines, such as Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences. Moreover, retreats can be used for all kinds of writing including teaching materials as well as pedagogic and subject-based research.

Issues associated with planning, implementing, managing and operating public transport projects in Ireland

Whilst considering the context to which public transport is planned in Ireland and internationally, the research has been concerned with studying the methodology and the roles of key stakeholders for the planning, implementation, management and operation of public transport projects in order to gauge the efficiency and suitability of the Irish planning process in relation to its international counterparts. The paper will present principal findings from structured interviews undertaken with key stakeholders involved in the Irish process and will provide a basis for debating the issues raised as a consequence of these interviews. Key issues raised include: 1) the possible complexity of the planning process in Ireland; 2) the role of political agendas in the decision making process; and 3) the governance and institutional arrangements for planning public transport projects in Ireland in contrast with other international countries.