Our original proposal planned to recruit students in order to help us to create content. However, as the HMRC has stopped the use of financial incentives to pay students this has proved difficult. Since these changes our interaction with student volunteers has dwindled.

On reflection though we had realised that the 3rd year students we had started the process with, although engaged and helpful on day one, have a lot of work to do. Our input was not seen as part of this work for the long term. This has led to some discussion between myself and co-researcher Richard on how we could better scope modules where there is suitable time available to work with students, align the activities to learning outcomes (advocated by Biggs and Tang, 2011) and communicate these benefits to tutors more effectively.

As a result of both the changes in funding and workload pressures of the initial group it was felt that this project would benefit from input from a wider range students and therefore we utilised our contacts. We talked with other tutors teaching group work modules who have moved towards embedding our content into their sessions, an approach promoted by Wingate (2018). We now have the opportunity to work alongside students in 4 separate modules to continue our research.

The main limitation to this new direction is that we haven’t had the chance to set up the MS OneNote projects with the tutors for other modules as we did for the first group. This was a time-consuming process initially, so we need to consider how to get this aspect of the research back on track.

Having decided before Christmas that the key to start the creation of material was choosing the right content examples, we wanted to gather as much evidence of the student journey through groupwork as possible. We therefore created a questionnaire to distribute across all the modules we are now working with and have started to see some results coming in. This will help us to create scenario examples to expand upon with student volunteers from a wider range of modules.

This week I have shown one cohort an example of the technology we are considering for our output . They were given a follow up exercise which provided 2 scenario examples to develop and an opportunity to offer additional scenarios based on their own experiences. As a result, we think we now have enough data for the project – currently reflecting on this.

The most recent session was with another 3rd year module which reinforced our thinking that final year students have a lot on their plate. As we have gained so much information in a short space of time it is important we weigh up the value to all involved of continuing to pop into sessions for the sake of possible extra snippets versus letting the groups carry on their designated class tasks with the perspectives we have offered.  Another thing to reflect upon, but we will probably begin our analysis now and talk to the students at the end of their assignments.

In addition to speaking to three 3rd year groups we will be working with a 2nd year group who have already impressed us with their digital output and appear keen to help us create the interactive videos for the output. We shall be seeing them in early February.

Next steps include analysis, developing usable scenarios and thinking about scripts!

 

Biggs, J. and Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university. Maidenhead: Society for research into Higher Education

Wingate, U. (2018) Academic literacy across the curriculum: towards a collaborative instructional approach. Language teaching 51 (3) 349-364