Harriet Dunbar-Morris | reflections

Research showed that students of different ethnicities had different expectations of university prior to the pandemic at Portsmouth, and so we asked ourselves the question, would this be the same of their expectations during the pandemic and then what would their perceptions of their experiences be? Some students had not expected to work so hard and independently for good degree outcomes pre-Covid19. What surprised me in this research was how so many students were uncomfortable with the self-directed, independent learning process, which in our ‘Blended and Connected’ model at Portsmouth was of a flipped learning approach, when it was mediated through more online processes. But that this was not necessarily the students from the same ethnic backgrounds who in the previous research had expected to easily gain good degree outcomes.

It strikes me that it would be a useful exercise to spend some time working with students to gain a shared understanding of what exactly Blended and Connected Learning and independent, self-directed learning are and embedding that in our induction and transition processes.

Having spent much time and effort to develop a ‘Blended and Connected’ approach to teaching, learning and assessment, where a real focus was on creating a sense of belonging and ‘connectedness’ for our students whether they were on campus or online as part of the blend, it was disappointing to find that students did not perceive that ‘connectedness’ in terms of feeling like a member of a university community. They did not value as much the opportunities to work with their peers or perceive that this worked well when undertaken online. In the future we still have work to do to develop the sense of belonging, both online and face-to-face, which is something that we are working on in our Being, Belonging, Becoming working group, which will be charged to take forward actions from this project by our Student Experience Committee.

The importance attributed to Personal Tutoring by the students was good to see, as we introduced a new Personal Tutoring and Development Framework during the pandemic, which already planned for a blended approach to tutoring sessions, however the results show that we still have work to do to ensure that staff and students fully embrace it. Personal Tutors are at the heart of the student experience and are best-placed to respond to students in a personalised way about their experience and understanding their background and their requirements. We have developed a Personal Tutoring Curriculum which should be more used to ensure timely, focused and flexible communication with students.

Links between Differing Perceptions of Quality of Learning and Student Engagement in Learning, a QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project led by Bangor University in collaboration with Grwp Llandrillo Menai

by Myfanwy Davies

Chrissi Nerantzi: Videos, bridges and labels or reflections through Chrissi’s eyes

Mirrors and windows are often mentioned as metaphors of what we expect to see as important characteristics in children’s stories. This is no difference, it seems, when designing learning and teaching experiences in higher education. Students who participated in our project wanted to see themselves in the curriculum (mirror) but also to grow wings and fly (window).

As an international educator in the UK with experience, of living, learning and teaching in three countries, studying differing perceptions of learning and teaching of ethnically diverse students, has been a truly fascinating and insightful experience. For me it has always been about being embracing, maximising on what diverse others bring and enriching our individual and collective experiences, expanding our horizons and work together.

That togetherness seems to be indeed important for participating students too. Our findings suggest that wanting to be and feel well, making friends and being part of something bigger, such as a community, are at the forefront of what our first and second year undergraduate ethnically diverse students see as most important enabling factors on their higher education journey. A wishlist that probably is not very different from what we all value as human beings, things that help us survive and thrive.

I would like to highlight the following that stood out for me.

1. Videos, really? I had underestimated videos… and was amazed at finding out about the superpowers of video recordings, their value for learning and how many ethnically diverse students transformed something that could be seen as a passive way of learning into a resource for active learning. I have seen my own children growing up fully immersed into the digital world and for hours, yes, hours, watching videos… and felt that this was far too passive. However, the resourcefulness and inventiveness of students’ learning with and from the recordings as shared during our focus groups surprised me. Students described how they routinely speeded up, sections, and transformed the recordings into flexible and valuable resources for active learning. I think their strategies are worth exploring further also in the context of flipped and peer assisted learning and the opportunities these bring. EVOLI, a video tagging tool for example, may open up new opportunities for engaging with video resources in a more focused and interactive way with peers and tutors. The usefulness of recordings also made me reflect on students as makers of recordings and how this can be utilised more for authentic learning through making combined with a range of authentic, active, collaborative and inquiry-based learning strategies including problem-based learning or example. A lot to think about and consider.

2. Build bridges! Students while recognising the value of professional networks and communities noted that they don’t seem to have harnessed these fully for their learning and development. The same applies for the opportunities open learning presents. Both of these approaches help students to build bridges to others, industry and communities that stretch beyond the boundaries of their course. It may be useful for educators to identify ways to connect a course and its modules with internal and external networks and communities, bring in elements of open learning, scaffold and support such opportunities in the curriculum. Such approaches, I feel, will boosts students’ confidence, highlight the importance of self-organised learning and the opportunities these present within and beyond their course to help them develop as professionals and becoming lifewide and lifelong learners. Furthermore, it will also create a path that leads progressively to greater autonomy, increased connection with peers within and beyond their course and reduce over-reliance or dependency on their tutor.

3. No labels please! This study reminded me of the dangers of adding labels or categories to individuals, adding them into specific boxes. In this case students. Learning styles, come to mind. I feel that we all have the capacity to learn in different ways and get better at the strategies and tactics we use. That also applied to ethnically-diverse students. It is of course extremely valuable to be aware and alert of learning differences including of ethnically diverse students and design for varied and flexible approaches to learning, teaching, support and assessment that help all students engage meaningfully in their learning, feel stimulated, motivated and connected with the themselves, others, the subject and the world around them. Exploring such opportunities with students has the power to transform the current students’ experiences.

There is a proverb that says “variety is the spice of life.” The same can be said for learning and teaching.

Being part of this collaborative QAA project has been fascinating and I have enjoyed working with Raheel in my own institution and with all colleagues in partner institutions and have learnt so much. Thank you for inviting me to join this important project.

Sarah Speight: Reflections on the QAA collaborative project

In designing and carrying out this collaborative project, the four partners have reflected not only on the experiences of our students, but also on our own experiences as University leaders equipped to act on the data. As a project team, we do not reflect the ethnic diversity of our student populations. While we acknowledge this on the project webpage, we need to give greater thought to how we deal with the disconnect that this creates in our use of the project data. This may be a small study, but it has captured voices by ethnicity and discipline across four different institutions – there is a recipe to be constructed from this. From the starting point of the current culture of each partner, we need to use the intelligence from the project to advocate for granular-level interventions that focus not solely on ethnicity, but upon ethnicity in disciplinary context to better understand effective support measures, for example for Black students in Business, or Asian students in Health Sciences. A key step is for institutions to equip their subject areas to be proactive and responsive at cohort level. But there is more too. If the project had been larger and longer, we might have explored the impact of institutional cultures and investigated how student perceptions differed not only by ethnicity and discipline, but also by institution. How are our institutional cultures and values, our staffing profiles, our policy norms, intersecting with ethnicity and discipline to affect the perceptions and experiences of our students, and hence their educational outcomes.

We design our courses to enable collaborative working amongst our students, positioning this as a key professional competence. This small partnership, brought together for this QAA-funded project, has enabled us as a staff group to hone our own collaborative working skills, and in so doing to better understand the strengths and limitations of our own networks by ethnicity in particular – this in itself has been an invaluable insight into the additional barriers that stand in front of the ambitions of many of our students.

Melita Panagiota Sidiropoulou: Reflective comment on the QAA collaborative project ‘Differing Perception of Quality of Learning’

This project gave us the opportunity to gather evidence from undergraduate students of their perceptions of the quality of learning and teaching in the current context of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on how these perceptions differ by ethnicity and by three subject areas.

Overall, we felt that this year students from various non-White backgrounds had a strong voice (equally as strong or stronger than White students), were as engaged as White students, and had similar or better perceptions of the quality of their learning over the past academic year, which was heavily affected by the pandemic and blended learning or online study approaches.

While the NSS results for the sector show lower satisfaction for non-White ethnic groups compared to White students, this project reported a different trend, and therefore certain practices from the four collaborative partners participating in the project can serve as examples of good practice regarding non-white ethnic groups. Recommendations and suggested actions emerge from the positive trends among non-White students. For example, other members of the team referred to: enhanced personal tutoring programmes; the introduction of a new Personal Tutoring and Development Framework; a Being, Belonging, Becoming working group; taking advantage of the ‘superpowers of video recordings’ (additionally, the type of recording, e.g. recordings of live lectures or pre-recorded material, and the quality of content are areas that need to be investigated carefully); building bridges to others, industry and communities that stretch beyond the boundaries of students' courses; actively appreciating different learning preferences and needs; approaching learning transitions with care; and so on.

While the spirit of my colleagues’ reflections covers my views and is related mostly to the words Differing and Quality of Learning in the project’s title ‘Differing Perceptions of Quality of Learning’, I will offer some reflection on the second word of the title: perceptions.

Not every experience described by students was positive, and indeed it was a difficult year for students, academics and other university staff. Consequently, students expressed some additional criticism towards various teaching and learning practices. While we need to encourage students to be partners in collaborative learning (and research), and student-centred approaches are a necessity, it is worth wondering whether the ‘novice’ (i.e., the student) should be regarded as the ‘expert’ when it comes to assessing academic and pedagogical practices (Ball, 2012; Holligan & Shah, 2017; Staddon & Standish, 2012). Such an approach may undermine the professionalism of academics and promote the ‘mechanisation of knowledge' (Lyotard, 1984). It also reflects a higher education that is not confident in what it offers, and whose aims are merely externally orientated (Staddon & Standish, 2012, p. 639). Recent research clearly argues that academics often struggle to do what is best for students’ education, while at the same time keeping them satisfied (Sidiropoulou, 2020). As Lukes (2005) argues, the invisible power of the manufacture of consent can empower or disempower academics, regardless of (a) the ethical implications of a misalignment of approaches that may exist between different stakeholders, and (b) the battle of core and external values.

For example, when students participating in this project valued their experience of ‘formal tasks and activities with other students’ less than other ways of learning, it does not mean that formal group learning practices do not have pedagogic value, or that we should stop doing what students do not value. Maybe the message here would be to aim to keep students satisfied and appreciating their constructive feedback, but staff should maintain their pedagogical vision and teaching and learning principles adapting carefully to new situations. Yes, we should use tools better, yet with the aim of making students satisfied AND educated. Perhaps the ideal situation would be one in which students develop more positive perceptions even if the quality remains the same, because they better understand the pedagogical value of certain practices (where practices are of good quality, of course). Universities have a mission to convey the right messages to students, and even though better quality and experience are at the centre of this, perception of quality should not be regarded as synonymous to quality. They are closely linked but they are not the same, and therefore perhaps academics should not only change what they do (if they need to change), but how they do these things. They should aim to help their students understand more about the way they are taught.

The spirit of the reflections in the previous two paragraphs applies to most surveys and student experience projects, but since this project is entitled ‘Differing Perceptions of Quality of Learning’, the same implications apply to this project, and we should endeavour to pay equal and balanced attention to each of the main four words of the title: Differing, Perceptions, Quality, and Learning.

List of references

Ball, S. J. (2017). Laboring to Relate: Neoliberalism, Embodied Policy, and Network Dynamics. Peabody Journal of Education, 92(1), 29-4. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2016.1264802

Holligan, C., & Shah, Q. (2017). Global capitalism’s Trojan Horse: Consumer power and the National Student Survey in England. Power and Education, 9(2), 114–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/1757743817701159

Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Lyotard, J. (1984). Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Sidiropoulou, P. (2020). An Exploration of Benefits of, and Challenges Associated with Student Experience Surveys, as Perceived by Course Leaders at The University Of Portsmouth. Portsmouth. Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth, Department for Curriculum and Quality Enhancement

Staddon, E., & Standish, P. (2012). Improving the student experience. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 46(4), 631–648. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2012.00885.x

Maddy Howard, Nursing (Adult) student, University of Portsmouth.

It was quite interesting to see the outcome of this study, and how it found similarities to points raised in the other focus groups to the one I was a part of. To hear the differences and commonalities around points that were not raised was also very intriguing as they brought thoughts which I had not considered previously, such as how people would listen to recordings at differing speeds to best facilitate their learning and time. In addition to the suggested conclusions made, I think it could be possible that the Social Sciences students (myself inclusive) may have shown preference of online learning to other courses simply because of the nature of our course being quite remote any way, therefore it was not as much of a drastic change for us to transfer to online studies and use of digital materials for learning (as we did this during placement periods anyway for assignments). We were already accustomed to the adaptive method of learning and were completing group tasks over video calls from the beginning of year one, and therefore were not as reliant on face-to-face meetings as other courses may have been for course progression. Then again, I am not familiar with the other courses and how they are conducted, so this may be irrelevant, if this is so I apologise. Student mental health and well-being is a tough subject which has no clear-cut method of addressing, and has been for many years. Although it is increasingly becoming better understood as time goes on, it is far from being handled to the extent many students would hope for, and this is under normal circumstances, let alone with the additional strains brought on by both student and staff alike by the pandemic. So even though there is a lot of negativity found among students regarding their perception on how they are supported regarding this (admittedly there is some positive too), I think the situation we currently find ourselves in could be an awful lot worse than it is, and I personally am appreciative of the efforts being put forward by the staff and neighbouring services to try and help us make it through this unforeseen crisis.