Specialist Area: Academic Skills

The Development of Academic Skills Support

Background

Throughout the first few years of my role as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, I took the time to familiarise myself with the degree programme and how my modules sat within the whole structure of the degree. One of the aspects I paid specific interest to was to see where we supported students with the development of skills that would help them to succeed in their studies (i.e. academic skills), and how learning technology was used to support this. I came to the realisation that this was not being delivered in a planned way and was not therefore enabling students to build year on year on the skills they would need at different points in the degree, rather it was delivered in a hap-hazard way within different modules -this meant there was no structure to this support resulting in clear gaps. Additionally, I could see the opportunity to use a variety of technology to help support students with the development of these skills. I took it upon myself to develop an Academic Skills provision across the whole undergraduate degree programme and the academic year 2018/19 saw the first delivery of these sessions. I thought carefully about where technology could support this provision, from the VLE to platforms like Qualtrics, and the way these are now used along with other learning technology is discussed below. I designed sessions and materials based on the analysis of the overview of support, making sure the provision filled gaps I'd identified and that learning technology was being used to its full potential. Over the past few years, the Academic Skills provision has developed further. Along with two now permanent members of staff and a newly appointed Director of Teaching and Learning, we have co-developed further sessions and resources using different learning technology platforms.

Outline of the support

Each year group has sessions relevant to the skills they need for that year of study and are:

• Year 1 students: essay writing, and study and revision skills.

• Year 2 students: critical thinking and writing.

• Year 3 students: preparing for essay based exams, and oral presentation of academic papers.

I also set up one to one sessions for writing support so students could book a slot with a member of the teaching team that was convenient to them, and get feedback on a revised version of a proportion of a marked assessment. The idea was for students to have the option to work on a particular writing skill and to then have feedback on this before using it in a future assessment. Over the last few years, I have added to this writing support by adding self-led exercises to the VLE, and adding varying example of previous student work to the Academic Skills VLE pages.

Development of the Academic Skills VLE pages

One of the first things I did was to set up a site on our Blackboard VLE (see image below). I felt this was the best platform to use as students log onto it regularly to gain access to their module resources and would therefore see the resources on a regular basis. Since students needed to have access to the different resources at different timepoints in their degree programme, I thought the best way to set up the VLE was to set it as an 'open' VLE site (i.e. not anchored to any one cohort). The VLE site was structured so that each year group had a section which housed the materials relevant to them but there were also sections relevant to all cohorts (e.g. writing support). Since I had just developed the series of 'How to...' videos, the Academic Skills VLE site was the perfect place to store them so that students could access all videos at all times rather than just the ones they had been signposted to from the feedback on their work (see section 1b). Although the materials were designed for students on our undergraduate programmes, I also gave all masters level students access to the site as I thought that some of the materials might be useful to them too (e.g. the How to...videos). Follow up work on the effectiveness of the 'How to...' videos showed that masters students found it very useful to have access to these resources.

The VLE has been added to over the last few years and now includes a section on online testing (e.g. using tools such as Qualtrics for testing participants of experiments), a general section giving advice on preparing for online exams (this was a result of exams moving online due to the pandemic), and further development of the writing support pages (see section 4).

Making use of the VLE tools

As part of the feedback on revised writing, there were a group of staff who were available to see students on a one to one basis. To enable students to submit their revised writing and for all staff to access the different paragraphs from students, I thought the best option was to set up a submission point on the Academic Skills VLE site. This was preferred over the student simply emailing the writing because often different members of staff would see the students. The submissions point on the VLE then enabled all staff involved to see all the submissions, allowing a greater degree of flexibility.

During the last term of 2020, we set up a series of sessions to help the Year 1 students with their writing development. Each week, we worked on a different element of writing, which involved giving the students a task to do. I then set up Collaborate Ultra rooms to have live online sessions with them at the end of the week to provide feedback on their work and to have a Q&A session. This worked really well because it enabled me and other members of the team to catch up live with the students since seeing them face to face offline was no longer an option.

As part of the writing weeks described above, I was responsible for recording a series of videos. I also developed a series of videos for the 2020/21 Year 1 cohort for skills such as revision and study skills. Using the embed option on the VLE, I was able to insert these videos in the relevant places on the VLE making it easy to access for students.

Submission point on the VLE

Collaborate Ultra room for group feedback on writing task

Example of an embedded video in the VLE

Using G Suite and Add-ons

For students to sign up to the one to one sessions for feedback on their revised writing, I needed to set up a system whereby students could sign up to a specific time slot, and one where I could send confirmation and reminder emails to students who had made a booking. I initially thought about using Google sheets so students could just add their names to slots that had space but upon reflection, I realised all students would be able to see who was signing up for support with their writing so it was not ideal. I therefore decided that Google forms was a better tool and added links to the forms on the VLE. Using the forms, students could choose a specific time slot on the different dates we were offering these sessions.

Link to an example Google form

I also needed to send reminder confirmation emails to the students who had signed up but needed to monitor if students had seen and opened the email. I became aware of the Google Add-on 'Yet Another Mail Merge' (YAMM) and thought this would be a useful tool to use. Consequently, I set up two different emails that allowed me to send confirmation information relevant to each student (i.e. the time of their session, who their session was with and which room to go to). This worked really well for me as it avoided the need to copy and paste emails and fill in the information relevant to each student. Rather, I could just maintain one set of records using a Google sheet and use that information to send the email to students. From the students' perspective, they received a clear email with all the necessary information so they knew where to go and who they were meeting. This worked well; I received no emails from students with queries about how the process worked (e.g. where they needed to go).

Developing the writing support

After Academic Skills had been 'live' for an academic year, I used Google forms to gain feedback from the students. Most of the feedback was positive but one area where they wanted more support was with academic writing. This is perhaps not surprising given that evidence in the literature points to this as being one area of concern for students (Elander, 2003).

Year 1 Feedback

Year 2 Feedback

Year 3 Feedback

Feedback on Revisions

The solution to this came from a funded project whereby as a team we developed the writing support on the VLE to include self-led exercises centred around the learning objectives for essays and practical reports (see the images below). We wanted these exercises to use a variety of different 'tests' where students could engage in interactive exercises such as MCQs, drag and drop, ranking, and highlighting text. The tools on the VLE did not offer this level of options so I decided to use Qualtrics and to embed these Qualtrics questionnaires within the VLE. This meant students could click back to previous content or re-try the quizzes before moving onto the feedback.

Qualtrics quizzes embedded in the VLE

In response to the requests from a few students, I also added examples of assessments of varying quality to the writing support VLE pages. These examples were for the two main different types of assessment (essays and practical reports), and gave examples from both Year 1 and Year 2.

While my original thought was that students should just have examples of exemplars (i.e. examples that attained first class marks), it seemed from their feedback that by giving the examples of varying quality, they could see how the different examples differed and why one was better (or worse) than another and could match their own work to one of the examples. I intentionally left the marker's feedback on each example so students could see why each mark had been awarded. The use of examples in this way is supported by evidence in the literature which shows that students value not only the use of exemplars to better understand the marking criteria but also an explanation of why these exemplars meet each criterion (Rust et al., 2003). Additionally, students often are able to apply their new learning to their own work if the skills are taught within the context of their own discipline (Elander et al., 2006), and since these were examples from previous students, the examples were all on topics they were studying as part of their degree. Students seem to really appreciate having these examples to refer to on the VLE to help them develop their writing skills and often refer to them in casual conversations with me about how much they have helped them develop a sense of where their work sits within the marking framework.

Where next for Academic Skills?

Over the last few years, as a team, we have built up the resources and added sessions to the Academic Skills provision but as the creator and coordinator of this support, I am more than aware that this will be a forever evolving repository. As time progresses, there will likely be requests from students to provide support in areas that we had not considered or to ask for further materials and resources to existing content. I am keen to look into different technology to see how it can support the development of Academic Skills. For example, Xerte is one platform I've recently become aware of and I'm interested in finding out more about how it works. Additionally, I am keen more generally to look into alternative assessment formats (e.g. blogs, vlogs) so Academic Skills will need to develop to provide students with the support they need to succeed in those different assessments. Learning technology will play a big role in this provision so I will be keen to find out from colleagues how they use this technology to support the development of student skills for these types of assessments.

Another area that I am keen to develop over the next 12 months has come from the experience of online teaching during the pandemic. Some of the ways in which teaching has been delivered during the pandemic will likely remain when things return to some level of normality and so we may need to consider the additional skills this requires from the student perspective. For example, during the last 12 months, the lecture content across all our degree programme was largely delivered via pre-recorded content that students could work their way through in their own time. This has highlighted weaknesses in students in various areas where they may need support (e.g. time management; organisational skills). Though we do provide some information on these types of skills early on, it may be useful to also provide practical skills relating to asynchronous learning and planning one's time effectively. Additionally, having to engage with synchronous online teaching has meant the use and development of skills that we do not currently cover in the Academic Skills support (e.g. Zoom etiquette; engaging in interactive online sessions effectively). While these have been aspects I myself have noted, it will be interesting to see at the end of this academic year what support the students think they need in terms of online learning moving forward, and for me to then reflect on how different learning technology can support these needs. That way, the Academic Skills provision can remain relevant to our students.