Education Lab

Durham University’s Education Lab is based in our award winning Teaching and Learning Centre. The lab provides a physical space and a community of digitally empowered educators who work at the cutting edge of pedagogic innovation. The space encompasses the Digital Playground, where the latest learning technologies can be trialled and a Media Room with recording facilities to support teaching learning. 

The Education Lab provides the kick start to realising a translational approach to education, where new ideas form and the latest thinking can be evaluated and improved so these approaches can be quickly translated from the lab and embedded into the Durham University classroom. It offers:

• Over £200k annually in internal grant funding to support innovation in teaching and learning.
• Fellowships for staff wishing to develop a new idea and spent one day/week working in the Lab
• Special Interest Groups around key emergent ideas in pedagogy.
• A Scholarship Forum where staff can share their experiences of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
• A Education Incubator Course for Staff Developing Educational Enhancement Projects
• Yearly Awards to Recognise Excellence in Teaching and Learning

The Lab allows staff to develop prototype approaches and evaluate these innovative research-informed solutions to enhance teaching and learning across the University. Staff can then disseminate their results broadly within Durham and across the sector, creating collaborative networks and developing a hub of best practice in innovative teaching and learning.

This work is focussed within our four key areas that encompass broadly critical elements of teaching and learning in higher education, namely: Active Pedagogies, Authentic Assessment, Inclusive Curriculum and Digital Learning.

Examples of our work include:

• The funding of a number of projects with highly innovative approaches to teaching, including the use of physical memory in learning; combining ballet with learning French; the development of innovative approaches to digital storytelling; ways to make numerical notation more accessible; virtual field trips and the use of narrative in education.
• The development of research groups in playful learning and immersive realities.
• Our national leadership of the emergent area of the use of virtual reality in Higher Education through coordination of a national network of VR users in HE.
• For more information visit our internal Sharepoint Site (for current staff and students)