Student Led Teaching Awards
Timeline
When deciding on your timing, think about the academic and students’ association calendars and other events and surveys which may clash with your awards project and detract from or add to students’ involvement. When would you get the most nominations? When could students attend a ceremony? How long should your nominations be open for?
Heriot Watt University Principal speaking at their Teaching Oscars
Longer nominations period will give students more time to nominate, however you may lose momentum and people may forget to nominate. Also means a long time between launch and awards, so you will need to do more promotion work.
Napier ran their nominations over a short period of time but they felt this helped to keep the energy around the project.
However, holding nominations over two semesters will allow students to experience more teaching staff and get to know teaching staff better.
Strathclyde noted that having nominations which close before, or early on, in the second semester would mean first year students would only have one semester of exposure to lecturers on which to base their views of teaching quality and lecturers.
Some found that holding the awards ceremony during the revision period for exams meant that there weren’t as many students there as they would have liked, and said they’d schedule this differently in future.
If you have particular plans of how you want to use your results, make sure your awards are planned so you’ll have time to collate these.
Sample timelines from the project: