Mobilising Remote Student Engagement

We held our first Project Board meeting on Thursday 26 February at River House, Kingston University. The meeting enabled us to meet with Andrew Comrie, our JISC-sponsored critical friend and get feedback from a range of students and staff on our project plan. Our key outcomes were as follows.

1. We need to push forward our baseline evaluation for the project, so that we can measure the impact of the curriculum innovations that we develop. This has begun at both KU and DMU, through questionnaires and focus groups. At DMU we have canvassed returners from Placement and those Level 2 students who are thinking about Placements. We have also spoken to staff about their expectations, although we need to do more work with industrial supervisors and work-place teams.
2. We need to ensure that we are one project on remote learning using mobiles and read/write web tools, and NOT two projects investigating placements and fieldwork. We will achieve this through our work-packages that tie our core project themes together. These themes are: effective learning activities for remote learning; the development of PLEs that support learning in different contexts; reflection in both formal and informal learning; developing independent working and ownership for remote learners; and, approaches to mentoring for remote learners.

We also need to look at contingency an dissemination funds in the project budget, and some of our documentation – especially a quality, evaluation and communication plan.