Sociology Student Portal & Study Skills Resources

1. Kevin Gillan & Gemma Edwards June 2011 Sociology Student Portal & Study Skills Resources

2. Student Portal Overview • Aims were to use a Sociology Student Portal to: • Foster a sense of a supportive community among the student body • Improve communication within the DA between students and staff • Resources: elearning support & TA for day-to-day running.

5. Experience so far • Community-0riented aspects: • Peer support (on hold) • Discussion groups (not terribly successful, blame offline component!) • Next year: student society wiki, sociology blog • Personalized learning resources: • ‘Ask the expert’ and online office hours • Both more successful, but still low student awareness of availability • Next year: embedding through intro week, course outlines and posters for key resources

6. Related project: ‘Making it Count’ - Exams Guidance and feedback in Sociology • Recognised that we can increase student engagement with the portal if we provide useful resources through it • A need to develop a base for generic resources in sociology which at present are repeated on different module sites • My project started this process by developing exam resources • Students had been requesting further support for exams. NSS results also indicated a need for greater feedback in sociology, and students had been requesting exam feedback specifically • Aims: • To develop an area within the sociology portal for exams guidance and feedback • To improve engagement between staff and students by delivering this content in a personalized way using multi-media • To develop the technical expertise, and a model, that we can use when expanding generic resources on the portal, such as essay writing advice, study skills, dissertations, presentations etc.

7. Resources created • Developed the area in bbl 9 sociology portal site (still under construction – Kevin’s bbl 8 site will migrate here) • Created movies as a key way to communicate exams advice and tips, using camtasia studio. • Devised revision tasks and quizzes with automated feedback (to be further built up over time) • Eventually turnitin will be used for students to upload a practice exam essay and conduct peer reviews (to improve interactivity and reflexive learning) • Ordered samsungusb microphones so lecturers can record their exam feedback straight onto PC and upload audio file to bbl 9

8. Resources created

9. Assessing the success of the project • Some problems with student access to resources due to bbl 8/9 situation. Difficult to know how aware students were of movies this semester • Bbl 9 site includes a survey for students to provide feedback and give suggestions for improvement (but as bbl 9 site not live yet we do not have data from this at the moment) • But did receive some positive feedback in emails from students and staff about the exam movie: ‘This is great! I will definitely add it to the Personal Life site and exhort the students to watch it (and will use it in my revision lecture next year)’ ‘just watched your movie! Well done I think it is a really very helpful presentation.’ ‘Great job on the revision video by the way, it was really helpful.’ (3rd year) ‘loved the video! just wanted to say thanks as it will be a big help about how to structure the intro/conclusion which i usually struggle on in exams!’ (3rd year) • Student reps will be consulted about the site and students encouraged to help develop further resources (e.g. interviewing staff etc).

10. Dissemination so far • Students have not yet moved to bbl 9 so could not access all resources this semester • However, movies embedded on bbl 8 student portal for students to view during the semester 2 examination period • The video embed code was also made available to sociology staff so that they could embed the video into their own course bbl site (thus making it available beyond sociology students) • The first round of exam feedback by course lecturers will be collected after marking and posted on bbl 8/9 sites for students to access post exams