Transcript ESCalate – the HEA Education Subject Centre: Sharing recent ESCalate resources on student learning including peer support schemes, e learning and internationalisation Dr Julie Anderson and.

ESCalate – the HEA
Education Subject Centre:
Sharing recent ESCalate resources on
student learning including peer support
schemes, e learning and
internationalisation
Dr Julie Anderson and Dr Fiona Hyland
UCET, 7 November 2008, Birmingham
www.escalate.ac.uk
Schedule for workshop today:
• Yourselves – request
brief introductions:
name, institution, main
work role, reason for
attending, hope for this
session (just a few
moments each please)
• Fiona and myself –
outlining some of the
centre’s work
Fiona and Julie’s input
• First half- Fiona:
Internationalisation project
including videopaper, peer
support scheme….
• Second half – Julie: E
learning resources from
2008 events, employability
resources, ICS-HE pages
and resources ( etc as
appropriate)
Brief overview of ESCalate, the Higher Education
Academy Subject Centre for Education
ESCalate produces and disseminates resources for
staff and students in HE and HE in FE including:
• Education Studies,
• Continuing Education,
• Lifelong Learning, as well as of course Initial Teacher
Education/ PGCE.
Much of the school based ITE resources are found
through the University of Cumbria pages…
The HEA and other Subject Centres
• The HEA has its own
website as do all the Subject
Centres
ESCalate website – key source of information:
• Online membership /
registration
• E-submission of funding bids
• External Examiner online
register
• Online Expertise exchange
• Online event registration
• Automated book reviews,
electronic bulletins and e
newsletters ( as well as old
fashioned paper!)
• Reports, research findings,
academic papers and
evaluations – both paper and
web based
First year support through student
mentoring
• Ginny Saich, University of Stirling, UK
[email protected]
• Supported by ESCalate
• Saich, G. (2008) Explicit first year support
through university student mentoring,
International Journal of Learning, 15 (10), pp
1-10.
Research literature 1st year experience
• High drop-out rate
• 1st year crucial to academic success
• Large student numbers can lead to
depersonalisation
• University organised peer support can:
– help establish friendship groups
– increase sense of belonging
– increase academic confidence
Methods
•
•
•
•
Literature review
On-line surveys of staff
Follow-up interviews with staff
Interviews with students
Results
•
•
•
•
79 responses to the survey
represented 57 HEIs
36 with peer mentoring scheme
21 no scheme
• reasons for no scheme:
lack of staff time, no ‘champion’
Establishing schemes
•
•
•
•
•
Participation is voluntary (74%)
Mentors are UG in same department (71%)
Paired by common modules (62%)
1 mentor to 1 mentee (40%)
Mentors receive training (98%)
A student view
• “I think it’s a subject that probably students coming to
university have no real concept of what it entails...
why are we doing psychology?... why do we have to
do these IT classes:… when do we actually start
teaching and not just theorising? Someone who has
the answers will probably calm a few fears and stop
people from jumping ship at the end of their first
module because they haven’t really understood the
point”
(undergraduate, female, year 2 student)
Staff views
• “The scheme produced the biggest increase in
retention to date of any single retention activity”
• “Demands on staff reduce as queries are addressed
to their first year peers…”
• “Amongst the 19 students who were mentored, we
got a 89% pass rate, and against the 21 student who
hadn’t been mentored but had asked to be mentored,
we had a 67% pass rate”
Conclusions
• You need an allocated budget, support from senior
management, a ‘champion’ and clear responsibilities
for individuals
• Sustainable schemes were linked with recurrent
funding arising from effective evaluation strategies,
efficient use of resource, enthusiastic staff and welltrained mentors
• 89% of staff engaged with mentoring schemes would
recommend them to colleagues (the rest, unsure)
Views of staff and students, from a range
of disciplines in UK Higher Education, on
internationalisation in 2008
Dr Fiona Hyland, Dr Sheila Trahar,
Dr Julie Anderson & Alison Dickens
Funded by Higher Education Academy (HEA) and ESCalate
www.escalate.ac.uk
Aims
To explore the perspectives of students and teaching staff on:
• what the terms 'internationalisation', 'internationalising the
curriculum', 'teaching and learning in an international landscape'
mean to them,
• the extent of internationalisation within their institution,
• the effects of internationalisation on teaching and learning,
• the challenges they have faced, and their successes,
• how internationalisation could be developed further in their
discipline and institution.
Methods
• 15 Focus groups in February to May 2008
• 5 locations with participants from across UK
• Separate groups of international & home students
• Topic guide
Numbers of participants
Staff
International
students
Home students
Birmingham
7
2
1
Bristol
3
6
8
7&5
2
0
London
6
4
1
York
7
5
3
Totals
31
19
13
Leicester
The staff experience
Challenges – participants said that some staff feel that:
• teaching international students can sometimes be
difficult and not always enjoyable,
• having to change is not easy,
• they do not always feel that have the necessary
experience and qualifications beyond the UK,
They don’t enjoy it
...they are usually very competent lecturers but they
don’t enjoy it. They really do not enjoy it. And it
seems ‘oh, they don’t understand what I’m saying, it
takes so long to read through their work, they don’t
participate in class, when they say something I don’t
understand it’. All of those barriers to effective
engagement are part of that management issue, of
how do you manage it. (Staff)
I know nothing
• I know nothing. What I know is… Anglo American content … in
all my knowledge… The students I teach aren’t in that tradition,
and they do teach me a lot, they do inspire me and I learn a lot
from my students and I hopefully always will … but in order for a
lecturer to go beyond that is asking a huge amount from a
lecturer… if we had a paradigm of an international lecturer, what
would they be? They’d be multilingual, they’d be well travelled,
they’ll have lived abroad in a number of different countries and
worked abroad … they would know the theory and content of a
number of different parts of the world … and how many of us
around the world fit into that category? – very few. So it’s a
huge demand on the lecturer here. (Staff)
Just how arrogant am I being?
Organising multicultural group work
I wanted them to mix with other nationalities and I wanted them
to become involved in people’s lives from other countries and to
understand different expectations but I had to sit down and think
‘just exactly how arrogant am I being' because what right do I
have to manipulate people in this way, what right do I have to
assert my middle-class western values of ‘it will be good for you’
to go and talk to people from other countries…
Just how arrogant am I being? (part 2)
… when their comment was ‘look, we’ve only just arrived here,
we’re struggling with language, we’re struggling with climate,
with struggling with culture, we’re struggling with academic
content, we’re struggling with referencing, we’re struggling with
just learning to learn in the UK environment and actually you are
not helping us by then adding yet another level of complexity by
making us work with other people when perhaps really my own
decision is, well perhaps I don’t want to do that’ and it really did
leave me thinking maybe I’m satisfying my own interpretation of
what an holistic education is, what a multi-cultural education is,
what an international education is, rather than actually listening
to the students. (Staff)
Staff experience - their suggestions:
• getting academics & other staff engaged
• opportunities for staff to share experiences
• more support
• practical information & guidance
• ‘It’s all our responsibilities’
• home students
And finally…
Full report to be published on the ESCalate
website this autumn 2008
http://escalate.ac.uk/4967
[email protected]
E Learning and other resources that may be
of interest…
• Intute
• E portfolio
• 2008 newsletter: e learning
issue
• ICS-HE
• Employabilty online module/
resources
• Student – incl. Student
conference
• April 20 09(B’ham)
On line employability module
A collaborative piece of work. It is:
– Online course developed using Blackboard Learning
System™ (Release 6). The Education version can be
used in Web CT and on PCs too.
– Adapted for education students. Two versions now, one
for each discipline ( Physical science and ours).
– An interactive course with personal study dimensions;
could be supported by university staff
– Student orientated
It is:
– Comprehensive: encompassing where the student
is now in terms of their perception of their skills
and experience and taking them forward to look at
their possibilities
– Task-based: a course of multiple parts, most subsections involve reflection or an appropriate small
research activity.
– Augmented by web resources, software, paperbased resources and potential for interactive
discussion board.
url link - http://escalate.ac.uk/2785
Contact us:
• Individual staff details are available on the
ESCalate Team page
• General Enquiries - ESCalate@Bristol,
• ESCalate
University of Bristol
Graduate School of Education
35 Berkeley Square
Bristol BS8 1JA
[email protected]
Tel: 0117 331 4291
• ESCalate@Cumbria
• For Initial Teacher Education (ITE) contact our
colleagues at the University of Cumbria.
• ESCalate ITECDLT
The University of Cumbria
Lancaster Campus
Bowerham Road
Lancaster LA1 3JD
[email protected]
Tel: 01524 385459