ISSUE 11: EDITORIAL OVERVIEW
2018 Reimagine Education Awards Judging Panel
Newcastle University, UK, is a proud sponsor of the Reimagine Education Awards.
Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes: against the backdrop of a fiercely competitive global higher education market and a body of increasingly discerning students, we applaud and share the competition’s ideology that the future of education will be shaped by those organisations whose commitment to enhancing student learning outcomes and employability is borne out by the creation of innovative and transformational educational initiatives.
Newcastle University was founded in 1834 to educate the pioneers of the industrial revolution – individuals who would go on to make advances in engineering, mining, shipbuilding, agriculture and public health that would resonate around the world. Teaching was then, and is still, at the heart of our University. At Newcastle, we educate for life, providing our students with knowledge and skills that will last a lifetime, and which are relevant and useful to life and the world around us.
Crucial to this is ensuring our students benefit from studying in a university that is internationally recognised for its research excellence. Through our undergraduate programmes students are challenged to engage with the frontiers of knowledge by staff working at the cutting edge of their disciplines, and are trained in and given the opportunity and skills to undertake research themselves.
Our belief is that, as well as being valued for its own sake, knowledge must be of wider value to both the individual and civil society. Our research must deliver impact, and the same has to be true of our teaching to ensure that our students develop the critical thinking skills, and the ability to operate independently and creatively in response to opportunities and challenges – attributes that are prerequisites for fulfilling their lifelong potential after graduation.
Our approach to ensuring that we deliver a consistently high quality experience for our undergraduate students is articulated in the Newcastle Offer. Phased in over a five year period, the Offer represents a systematic, institution-wide change programme to develop our strategic learning and teaching initiatives iteratively, piloting new approaches so that their development and implementation is evidence-based and takes full account of feedback from students and staff.
Newcastle University’s commitment to delivering consistently outstanding teaching, learning and outcomes for its students has been recognised by a Gold award in the UK government’s Teaching Excellence Framework of the highest quality found in the UK.