LJMU Learning and Teaching Conference 2010 - Wednesday pm

After lunch, which again was very nice, it was time for the last two sessions of the conference. The first session I attended was by Clare Horrocks from the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts, talking about getting a verbal/visual mix in the Communication and Cultural Research module. Clare talked about a number of different resources she uses including 19th Century UK Periodicals which we have a subscription to at LJMU. She uses lots of digital sources and for her the visual layout is as important in teaching as the actual text.

The last session of the conference for me was Steve Moss and Paul Welsh talking about using Blackboard to support the foundation degree in police studies. This is a course that working off-campus I need to be able to support so I wanted to find out more about what they were doing with Blackboard, to aid with any queries I might get from these students. The course has a number of different cohorts, totally around 200 students in all, who start at 5 week intervals. They have set up sections for each cohort with an FAQ section that is continually updated. They used the blog tool in Blackboard for group blogs stimulating discussion around key topics and individual blogs for reflection. Forum engagement is 20% of the mark and currently they are trying to address problems getting the students to engage.

They have overcome many technical issues related to police firewalls as well as our LJMU firewall, but this is always something that needs to be considered before introducing something new. They asked staff who use Blackboard to feed in any good ideas for areas they could adopt for this course.

All in all a very interesting and stimulating conference as always. There are things to bring back to my area that we can use to enhance the student experience, particularly in relation to user education and I hope next year more Library and Student Support staff will be presenting at the conference.

LJMU Learning and Teaching Conference 2010 - Tuesday am

In IM Marsh for two days at the annual Learning and Teaching Conference. I'm being coming to these things for a few years now and it always fires my interest. It's good to know what's going on in other parts of the university - there is so much good practice out there and this is a really good place to celebrate it.

The keynote session was really interesting - looking at student feedback and how what students expect from feedback isn't necessarily what they feel they are receiving. They want feedback and prefer to receive verbal feedback - "it's good to talk" - we heard from students about their experiences of feedback and what they want and then we heard from Alex Spiers and George Macgregor about how to provide verbal feedback via email. It was a very good demonstration of how easy it is to provide feedback in a way that students appreciated. Feedback need to involve a conversation so students receive it in the way that is most relevant to them. We also need to encourage them to make the best of feedback, to act on it and to use it for future assignments.

After the keynote is was straight into sessions on the student experience. The first session was by Phil Carey who is always a joy to listen to. He had looked at the experience of being a student rep at programme level. His focus was in his own faculty - Health and Applied Social Sciences and he interviewed about their experience. Phil talked about their motivations for becoming student reps and what in reality their jobs entailed. The students were all volunteers both for the role of student rep as to take part in the project, so the research needs to take that into consideration. The students saw the role in a number of ways:

• A voice for fellow students - as a rep, as a consultant on particular issues and an advocate for students
• A mediator - as a link in the faculty, but also managing conflict and a way to take the heat and anger out of student concerns and present them in a more balanced way in order to be listened to
• Provide help and support - both as a source of information but there is a pastoral care function too
• To develop a sense of community
• Extension of the course team - anticipated the reactions of staff sometimes when concerns were brought to them but also felt as a peer in meetings with academics

They all saw the role as beneficial both for themselves and for others. There are challenges for individuals associated with being a student rep and challenges for the institution in order to support the role.

The second session looked at students expectations and how we managed that. Graeme Mitchell ran this session and he argued that student retention is affected by a number of factors but part of the issue could be whether what they expect of LJMU and university in general matches their experience. He asked the questions - should we meet students expectations whatever they are? Should students expectations change to fit what is a "normal" experience? or should we both compromise? This stimulated some discussion with a couple of good examples of engaging students early on as they arrive in order to help retention. There was some agreement that whatever we did it needed to be done earlier i.e. before they arrived. Is it better that a student who feels their expectations cannot be met doesn't enter the university at all rather than drops out early on?

The examples of good practice made me think that we need to look again at our induction process. What are we doing in Library & Student Support to engage users early on. One of the students in the session said that they are bombarded with information in the first few weeks and told everything they need to know for the next three years and expected to remember it. She suggested that induction should be a year long process. Although we have looked at our initial induction I think more work needs to be done as we still do bombard students with information that at the time they probably fail to see the relevance of. Should we be asking them what they expect from the library service? If we ask current students what and when they felt they needed to know over their first year we could plan better more engaging user education.

Lunch was next which was very tasty although as always there was a bun fight around the bread/salad table (its round and too small)

ALT-C Day One - Morning

After the keynote I chose to listen to two more invited speakers, the first being Aaron Porter who gave a very interesting talk about the students perception of the student experience – this is quite topical for us as it’s changed the way we operate at LJMU by bringing student admin and library services together in one place and one team – the whole purpose being to enhance the student experience. Aaron talked about how to engage students into the academic community – to help them feel part of something, which then will increase engagement. When asked why they came to university most students talked about improving their career prospects/to help them get a good job. There weren’t any comments about wanting to be part of an academic community or even wanting to study a subject they were interested in – I guess they are more pragmatic than maybe we give them credit for. Aaron said that the induction process can have a huge impact on increasing engagement in the academic community. He suggested introducing academia into the social network spaces where the students reside. Don’t try to take over this technology but make use of it to engage your students. Most students will discuss their work with others in this environment but if asked whether they use social networks for academic purposes most will say no. They are doing it but aren’t necessarily recognising it as such.

The other key points of Aaron’s session were that universities need to take on board the skills that students come to university with, and not make assumptions that all are digital natives but provide the facilities to upskill those that aren’t. And feedback, this is vital to feeling part of the community, asking for students feedback, taking it on board and acting on it, then demonstrating that you’ve done this “you said.... we did...” approach. Make it more Amazon-like, were you can track the process of your feedback like an Amazon order.

The next invited speaker was Richard Noss. He did lose me a bit in some areas but the things I picked up from his session were knowledge is different from information and we need to understand the relationship between them. We need to redefine what we are trying to teach, what knowledge do we want our students to acquire. We need to think about how we teach the knowledge of tomorrow.

Next was a couple of active learning sessions, looking at audio. The first by Andrew Middleton focused on the process of capturing audio, recording the transient, the conversations outside the formal classroom setting. For him the capture of the audio was more important than the delivery of it. It’s active learning, it the activity of capturing the audio that’s the point. It was a way of capturing voices, voices of students, voices of tutors, external voices – the aim being to engage the learners.

The second audio session was by Tim Neumann talking about the MoSAIC project (models for synchronous interactive audiographic conferencing http://projects.lkl.ac.uk./mosaic). They used multiple tools for realtime interaction. The aim is to produce guidelines for tutors to help them use realtime conferencing – linked to pedagogic theories, grounded in observation of practice.

Then it was time for lunch which was good.