Join the TIPS Community
The Teaching Innovation and Practice in Student Education (TIPS) Community is a network for teaching and support staff with the aim of collecting and sharing examples of effective practice from across the University.
Through most of 2020, staff and students have adapted to challenging new circumstances for student education as a result of the pandemic.
Colleagues have devised their own solutions to the problems encountered and have engaged rapidly with new and unfamiliar technologies.
The TIPS Community provides a forum for teaching staff at Leeds to share tips and tricks and to provide mutual support, by colleagues, for colleagues.
Cultivating a community of practice
The TIPS Community started in June 2020 as a small work stream to encourage staff members to share solutions to common challenges in the move to online learning during the pandemic.
Meeting fortnightly and exchanging ideas, tips and information through its Teams space, the group continuously grew to 200 and more members in the space of weeks.
It is now a network for teaching and support staff at Leeds, facilitated by Organisational Development & Professional Learning (OD&PL) and closely linked to the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE) and the Digital Education Service (DES).
TIPS has organically developed into a community of practice, a space for peer-to-peer exchange, cultivating a culture of mutual support, professional development and learning.
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (…) Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015)
A brief introduction to communities of practice can be found on this page.
Join the Community
Any members of teaching staff (or related posts) can join the network by requesting access to the TIPS community Microsoft Teams space.
Join the TIPS communityThe TIPS Community holds regular meetings to focus on the development of the spaces where content is shared, to highlight current events and news and to provide a forum for exchange of ideas.