Dr Neil Williams, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing

On paper the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) is very similar to Kingston University. It has 23,000+ students with about half living at home; funding is dominated by teaching-related income and it is very committed to widening participation. On

arriving at the 1000-acre campus the similarities end. The student union building is huge, there are many restaurants and meeting places for students, the sports hall seats 9,000 spectators and they are building an American Football stadium at a cost of $100 million.

Such spectacular student facilities contribute enormously to a greater student engagement with the university. Kingston will never be able to match these resources, but I am sure improved sport and recreational facilities would increase student engagement. In contrast, the scientific teaching laboratories and classrooms that I saw looked “tired” compared to the facilities we have in the Eadweard Muybridge and John Galsworthy buildings. It is this mixture of similarities and differences that made the trip so informative. I was missing Induction week during my visit and it was interesting to note that it is managed very differently at UNC Charlotte. Dr Dennis Weiss, Dean of Students, told us about SOAR

(Student Orientation, Advising and Registration) and how they include parents in the process as well. Multiple, small-scale residential 1 ½ day university inductions are held throughout the summer, well in advance of the start of term. This has the advantage of spreading the burden of enrolling freshers and avoiding long queues. Another successful induction program was UTOP, a well-attended, five-week summer residential programme for minority students.

I was particularly impressed by the wide range of central, student support offices and associated programmes, even if some had rather contrived acronyms (PRODUCE Producing Readiness of a Diverse University Cohort in Education!). I attended a number of

sessions on the work of The University Centre for Academic Excellence (UCAE), headed by Catherine Blat, this covered:

• Tutorial Services, providing tutoring in introductory maths, science, business and foreign languages;

• Skills workshops, and a 10 week Freshmen seminar programme for students on probation.

• Supplemental Instruction (SI), which uses small Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) sessions to help keen students improve their grades “in challenging courses such as science or engineering”;

• BEST (Building Educational Strengths and Talents) which focuses on students who are the first in their family to attend college by providing study seminar classes and a Learning Community.

• SOS (Student Obtaining Success) programme. A Peer Mentor scheme for students who are on academic probation. Mentors are trained to identify academic barriers to success and develop an action plan for the student.

• Another successful mentoring scheme, SAFE (Student Advising for Freshmen Excellence) is run by the Dean of Student Office.

This is open to all students but again is focussed on reaching out to students from underrepresented groups. There are examples of mentoring and supplemental teaching at

Kingston, however my impression is that the scale of the offering and the uptake by Charlotte students is much greater. We had the chance to talk and listen to students involved in each of the programmes. They spoke very passionately about being mentors

and it was illuminating to find out what spurred them on to take on these roles; some did up to 6 hours of mentoring work a week. One reason for their success is that these programmes are well established and have slowly developed over 10+ years. When asked about how they managed to recruit so many mentors, they replied that recommendations from academic staff and well established recruitment and training before the academic year

starts, were key factors. Many of the schemes were successful as they were up and running from week 1 of the term and there was close integration with the Colleges (Faculties). Another critical component to the success was significant staffing resources; the centre has 8 permanent professional members of staff, plus grad assistants, tutors, SI leaders, mentors and student office assistants.

Ted Elling, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, demonstrated the extensive evaluation of these schemes. The results of these evaluations have been instrumental in sustaining many of these programmes. We were also lucky enough to listen to a Learning Community programme research presentation hosted by Cynthia Wolf Johnson (Associate Provost for Academic Services), where the reasons for their success were probed by Kim Buch and Daniel Bonilla from the Psychology department. Learning communities of students have proved successful in improving grade point averages and progression rates.

One fundamental difference is that where at Kingston we might modify the curriculum, teaching or assessment in a module to tackle low grades and poor progression, at UNC Charlotte it seemed that the module is less likely to be changed; instead support mechanisms tend be invoked. Also a lot of the academic skills covered by UCAE are taught in academic skills modules and dealt with in PDP sessions with personal tutors. However, I think Kingston could gain a lot by recruiting more mentors and PAL leaders and using Learning communities to support students who find various transitions at University challenging. Perhaps a university centre to provide training and funding for this type of activity would be a good idea.

I think Kingston could also make use of the principle of academic probation, where students who are failing in semester one are identified and required to engage with one of the activities of the ACAE. This may be a 10-week seminar scheme aimed at getting them engaged with the university and classes on a variety of academic skills, or a scheme such as SOS, where student mentors and staff help develop a personal action plan for the upcoming

semester.

*Lyrics by Ryan Adams

Tim Linsey, Academic Development

As part of the UNC Charlotte study tour I followed my own technologies enhanced learning track for most of the visit. I got a fascinating insight into Charlotte’s use of technologies to support learning, covering both central departments (Centre for Teaching & Learning; Office of Disability Services; Office of Classroom Support; Students Union) and faculties / Schools (College of Health and Human Services; College of Engineering; College of Liberal Arts & Sciences – Department of Physics & Department of Earth Sciences & Geography; College of Education), including participation in staff development workshops and also joining a cross institutional panel to exchange experiences in addressing accessibility issues. There were many similarities in the types of learning technologies being used including a core VLE (based on Moodle), desktop video conferencing, electronic voting systems and interactive podium screens for example. I was impressed by the widespread use of student interns and the in-University part-time student employment opportunities. Examples included the use of a student team (4 interns) working as part of the ‘Learning MD’s (Multimedia Developers) programme to support staff in the development of video resources, and secondly a team of 11 students involved in the building, deployment and support of classroom podiums.

Staff development in technology enhanced learning was focussed in the Centre of Teaching and Learning (http://teaching.uncc.edu/ ) with a strong programme of events and I particularly liked their fortnightly podcasts recorded by teaching fellows and other academics (see http://teaching.uncc.edu/podcasts ), and we will look to establish something similar. I attended 3 very good workshops and of particular interest were two of the workshops that were run centrally and led by faculty academics including a session on the use of short videos in teaching sessions delivered by an academic from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences teaching in New Media for Communication Studies.

Secondly was a fascinating session delivered by an academic from the College of Education entitled ‘Workshop: Engaging the Millennial Student in Learning’. This workshop focused on who the millennial student was rather defining them by their use of technology. This included discussion on the impact of ‘baby boomers’ as parents.

I am also following up with Kingston colleagues with regard specific areas of collaboration that were raised on the visit including areas of engineering and geography. In addition I had discussions over piloting the use of Kingston’s One Community environment to support both Kingston University and Charlotte students on exchanges. I have provided a very brief overview of the staff that I met and the departments that I visited but please contact me if you would like to follow up on any aspect of what I have covered above.

One of the technologies that we currently support at the University is that of desktop video and audio conferencing.  Anecdotal evidence would indicate that nationally usage beyond supporting distance learning and language teaching has been restricted to innovative pockets of practice.  However in recent months I have participated in an increasing number of events using these technologies and I wonder if this is part of a wider trend.  I have outlined a few recent examples below.

As part of the MoRSE project I gave a joint JISC seminar with Dr Richard Hall at De Montfort University on ‘Mobilising Remote Student Engagement: Institutions, Personalisation and Applications’ (see http://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/morse/2010/01/11/institutions-personalisation-and-applications/). Although this was a joint presentation we were over 100 miles apart when we gave it with the audience spread around the UK. Although this was restricted to live audio we did simultaneously broadcast our slides with a live text based discussion taking place.  I found this more exhausting than giving a conference presentation but we had a very positive debate and engagement.

-          Back in December in preparation for our Learning Technologies review a team of ADC and IS staff participated virtually in a one day event run by the Learning Environment Review Special Interest Group (LERSIG) at the University of Bradford on ‘Reviewing the VLE’.  The video stream from Bradford was good quality and was displayed via a data projector at the KU end. This was a very positive experience with the local KU debate extending an hour beyond the end of the presentations.

In January I attended a one seminar on digital Identities at the British Library organised by Eduserv.  One of the speakers, Professor Shirley Williams, University of Reading, was unable to attend due to the snow.  However in conjunction with a colleague she was able to deliver her presentation from home and engage in a very interesting discussion.

We have also experimented with live streaming of video from field, though using slightly different technology to video conferencing, and I have also noticed recent conference calls were an option has been provided to give a presentation remotely.  I would argue that there are many applications of this type of technology in learning and teaching beyond the obvious.  If you wish to find out more about this, the technologies we support, loan technologies available and related staff development please contact Anne Law (a.law@kingston.ac.uk).

CISM ran a successful Blended Learning (BL) staff development day in January at the Lensbury in Twickenham. Mark Russell from the “Bended Learning CETL” (Centre of Excellence in Teaching & Learning) from the University of Hertfordshire kicked-off the day with a motivational overview, showing that it’s appropriate to consider BL as a continuum, not just in terms of what can be done using a range of technologies but also what’s appropriate in a given subject/module context.

The rest of the day was devoted to well-appreciated talks from a variety of Kingston and SWan volunteers that provided opportunities for networking (blending) and learning:

• Dave Rayner (SWan), Nick Lock (HSCS), Adèle Atkinson (HSCS) and Maria Martini (CISM) teamed-up to showcase various uses of the Wimba audio/video-conferencing tools for Blackboard.
• Luke Hebbes demonstrated KUOLE (“KU Online Learning Environment”) which is being developed in CISM to provide an alternative to some of Blackboard’s functionality, integrated with a “virtual PC lab” that’s been successfully live-tested on some of CISM’s PG modules.
• Jonathan Briggs explained how he’s been using weekly assessed tasks and guaranteed 24-hour feedback to challenge & encourage student participation.
• Tony McNeill (ADC) braved the Lensbury’s dodgy wireless network to showcase BL resources from other faculties.
• Chris Hutchison showed just how much one can do in Second Life to facilitate learning, teaching and assessment, and how much CISM and KU have already created, essentially for free, in a virtual campus development to rival the largest of “real life” building projects.
• Islam Choudhury and James Orwell discussed different aspects of objective/computer-based tests, both oriented around the use of question banks and shared resources that ease the initial e-assessment front-loading burden.
• Finally John Lindsay took us on a tour through the meaning of blending when it comes to learning, bringing us all back to the need to consider the context when considering BL

Overall it was an excellent taster event and the faculty will be running additional follow-up sessions based on the feedback we gained from the BL day’s evaluation.

James Denholm-Price, L&T Coordinator, Faculty of CISM

Chris Hutchison (also online at http://www.slideshare.net/hutchison/second-life-blended-learning-presentation).

James Denholm-Price

j.denholm-price@kingston.ac.uk

Please encourage all those who have been involved in PAL (Peer Assisted Learning) activity this year to put in an entry for this award.  The winners will receive £100 and their reflection published on the university’s website.  The awards will be presented at the Celebration of Teaching Event on June 10^th, 2009.

            PAL leaders will be asked to write a 1000 word reflective piece. The choice of       titles –

·         Choose an incident or activity from your mentor experience that has been significant for you to reflect on how you managed the incident or experience.

Or

·         Outline your perceptions of the benefits of the Peer Mentoring/PAL Scheme for: PAL leaders, the university, and other students.

Deadline for submissions – Friday 8^th May.

Details will be posted on Staff and Study space.  I will be contacting all the PAL co-ordinators and the students who have taken part in training sessions this year.

j.gay@ingston.ac.uk