Dr Mark Zarb

Enhancing the student experience

Mark is keen to improve the student experience. He was funded by the Higher Education Academy to run a research project to discover what concerns pupils have when entering higher education. The themes that are discovered from this research allow Mark and his colleagues to discuss or directly tackle the things that concern students most.

As Foundation Year Coordinator, he created an extended induction for incoming students that enhanced their experience by assigning them into teams with a prescribed challenge to solve over their first four weeks. This allowed students to informally experience team working without the expectation of awarded grades. The teams have been seen to continue their collaboration and support of each other throughout their first semester.

Collaborating to improve education

Mark has co-authored a number of peer-reviewed papers relating to the student experience, discussing topics such as authentic assessment, motivation, contextualisation of problems and the use of social media and video-based assessment. These papers, along with his active national and international involvement in the wider computer science education community has led to an external recognition of his practice. He has been invited to contribute to subject-specific pedagogic practice through events like the international CSTeachingTips.org workshop. Mark was also invited to be a keynote speaker at a workshop on non-traditional skills and entrepreneurial education.

Mark also collaborates across schools and is working with his colleagues in the School of Pharmacy and Life Sciences to establish potential studies. He also submitted a paper for review to the Higher Education Pedagogies journal in collaboration with a colleague from the School of Creative and Cultural Business.

Mark holds memberships at university-level committees, including the Teaching, Learning and Assessment Sub-Committee, which allows him to participate in discussions about issues affecting higher education as well as update his school’s management team on items that need to be addressed on a strategic level.

And there’s more

Mark organises and presents at workshops, open days, applicants’ days, visit afternoons and school visits in order to widen access to higher education. He’s also responsible for developing and teaching content for the school’s participation in the university’s ‘Access to’ programme since 2014 and has actively led it since 2016. This gives the school a close working relationship with MD20/40 students, which moved its inclusion from 39 percent of the class in 2015-16 to 56 percent in 2016-17.

Mark was awarded Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in 2017. Through the Professional Teaching Framework offered by DELTA, he gained a postgraduate certificate in Professional Studies (Academic Practice), and has volunteered to act as a mentor to some of his colleagues throughout their own Professional Teaching Framework experiences.