Parallel Session Round #2

Parallel Session Round #2

Keywords: Academic / Learning Analytics, Diversity and Inclusion, Orientation and Induction, Student Engagement, Support Services, Technology Enhanced Learning, Transition, Virtual / Hybrid Teaching and Learning

Workshop Session A

Education is for everyone? – Reflecting on class and classism in higher education

HS XII (ATEG036)

 

Workshop Session B

Rewriting student engagement: a more democratic and inclusive story

SR Architektur 104 (AT01104)

 

Paper Session A

Individual attention plan for first year students

Introduction to Intercultural Understanding at HEIs

HS VI (ATEG142)

 

Paper Session B

Supporting Transition via Engagement Analytics: A Digital Safety Net

Exploring the links between ‘Belonging’ and ‘Mattering’ and the impact on student achievement

HS VIII (AT02002J)

 

Paper Session C

All change! Insights from an institutional transformation of induction

Student Diversity & Pandemic Resilience

HS I (ATK1120H)

 

Show and Tell Session A

ED Owl – gamifying learning using staff-student partnership

Measures for Ensuring the Quality of Teaching at CAMPUS 02 UAS

Study Smart – Introducing effective learning strategies

SR Architektur 098 (AT01098)

 

Show and Tell Session B

Expanding integrated student guidance by a mentorship program

Do it (for) yourself‘: e-learning for a sustainable Study Guidance

The First-Year Integration Test: monitoring social and academic integration

HS II (ATK1008H)

 

Workshop Session A

Education is for everyone? – Reflecting on class and classism in higher education

Keywords: Teaching Staff, Diversity and Inclusion, Transition

Dr. Lisa Scheer
University of Graz, Austria

“I sometimes feel so stupid because I don’t understand anything.” This is how many students experience their first year(s) at university. We take such emotions and experiences as a starting point for reflecting about social inequality in higher education. This knowledge is central for good teaching and can help keeping students motivated and engaged. In the workshop, we will focus on class/social origin and its significance in higher education, stressing that class is to be understood as intersecting with other power relations like gender and race. Research results from the project “Habitus.Power.Education – Transformation through Reflection”, which was conducted at the Institute for Educational Research and Teacher Education, University of Graz, from 2019 to 2021, will be our starting point for discussion these questions:

• What challenges concerning class and classism are higher education institutions, teachers and students confronted with?
• What is done at your higher education institution in order to address social background and classism?
• How could first year students be better addressed in their needs, challenges and fears

Workshop Session B

Rewriting student engagement: a more democratic and inclusive story

Keywords: Beginners, Diversity and Inclusion, Student Engagement

Manûshân Nesari & Yasmine Goossens
UCLL University of Applied Sciences, Belgium

Over the past three years, UCLL, a University of Applied Sciences in Belgium has been redefining the foundations of student engagement. In collaboration with students and the services involved, the project ‘Student Participation 2.0’ was launched, focusing on more inclusive and democratic student participation.

In this interactive workshop, our goal is to develop a brief analysis of student engagement in the participants’ organization. During this workshop we’ll guide participants through our own process and together we’ll also identify barriers that students may encounter. In the end we look for possible solutions to make student engagement more inclusive, and share some good practices we’ve encountered during our own project and research.

To achieve these goals we’ll concentrate on a few guiding principles, partnership and thematic working, which strongly emerged in UCLL’s project. We will identify the barriers together using different student profiles (first year student, work student, international student,…).

Throughout this workshop we hope to give the participants new insights on student engagement so they can start redefining student engagement in their own institution.

 

Paper Session A

Individual attention plan for first year students

Keywords: Beginners, Orientation and Induction, Transition

José Antonio Ballesteros, José Luis González (Marcos D. Fernández, Raquel Cervigón, Benito del Rincón, Miguel Ángel López, Arturo Martínez-Rodrigo, Raquel Martínez, César Sánchez and Juan Manuel Sánchez)
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain

Students entering the University for the first time get involved in an induction process that might be difficult and could eventually determine their personal and professional future. The combination of all those factors can yield at: his adaptation without help needed, but with an evident extra effort (the positive one); or the frustration of him and even the drop out of the degree (the negative one).

An individual attention plan for first year students is described and analyzed. The plan tries to ease the adaptation process of first year students at the university by some classic actions as teacher-tutors and by other new, such as peer-mentoring (the keystone of the plan). A welcome day, an initiation course and regular meetings with first-year supervisor are other actions of the plan.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the plan, surveys and reports are required for new students, student-mentors, first-year teachers and teacher-tutors, that are then analyzed to improve the individual attention plan proposed in a continuous improvement process.

All the activities were considered as useful and new students positively valued the plan, considering that it should definitely continue.

Introduction to Intercultural Understanding at HEIs

Keywords: Beginners, Diversity and Inclusion , Orientation and Induction

Mr. Patrik Foltýn
Tomas Bata University in Zlín, the Czech Republic

Introduction to Intercultural Understanding in the environment of HEIs can be a tricky place for new students from different cultures with other understanding and communication standards. Neither they nor the HEI employees are often aware of cross-culture differences in communication and mutual understanding with their HEI surroundings. The goal of our paper session is to raise awareness between the participants in terms of intercultural communication and potentially grow their competencies in this area. That should bring down future communication problems and challenges between both parties to the minimum and raise the well-being of all interested stakeholders.

Our paper session will consist of:
• Short introductory self-evaluation questionnaire about cross-culture stereotypes and behavioral differences.

• Presentation about behavioral aspects in cross-cultural communication based on socio-cultural diversity with examples of best practices of creating a welcoming for international students.

 

Paper Session B

Supporting Transition via Engagement Analytics: A Digital Safety Net

Keywords: Beginners, Academic / Learning Analytics, Student Engagement

John Wyatt and Dr Maurice Kinsella
University College Dublin, Ireland

Transitioning to higher education can present psychosocial challenges to first year student(s), potentially hindering their engagement and academic progression. Given the recent proliferation of digital engagement strategies, it is vital to recalibrate teaching and support frameworks and ascertain learner analytics’ role in potentially addressing disengagement.

University College Dublin’s ‘Live Engagement & Attendance Project’ (LEAP) has created an analytics framework offering Academic Advisors (AAs) programme-level first year engagement data to help support staff conduct timely interventions following students’ potential disengagement.

LEAP’s longitudinal data (2019-2022) includes quantitative analytics from student logins and online content topic access (n= 270) and qualitative feedback from student surveys and advisory staff interviews. LEAP analytics data was predictive of student GPA attainment. Also, feedback showed stakeholders recognised AAs’ centrality in promoting engagement and endorsed an analytics-enhanced safety net.

LEAP’s institutional impact is discussed, alongside core theoretical frameworks (e.g. self-determination theory), its feasibility and key research findings.

Exploring the links between ‘Belonging’ and ‘Mattering’ and the impact on student achievement

Keywords: Teaching Staff, Diversity and Inclusion, Student Engagement

Clair Zawada
Birmingham City University, United Kingdom

Belongingness is the human need to be accepted, recognised, valued and appreciated by a group of other people. The concept of belonging is important for individuals to feel accepted in a social environment, and in academia belongingness is a key contributor to student success and retention. Mattering is defined as the perception that we are a significant part of the world around us. Mattering differs to belonging in that perceptions of mattering occur through an individual’s interpretations of others’ behaviours towards them, whereas belonging is more group orientated.
264 health science students completed a questionnaire comprising of; demographic data; mattering at university scale (Elliot et al, (2004) 24 item index); mattering on placement scale (Elliot et al (2004) 24 item index); belonging at university scale (Malone et al (2012) 6-item GBS scale) and belonging on placement scale (Levett-Jones et al (2009) 34-item scale). Students were also asked for their student ID number, so that academic data could be accessed.
Analysis looked for correlations within the data and factors significantly correlated with academic achievement.

 

Paper Session C

All change! Insights from an institutional transformation of induction

Keywords: Beginners, Orientation and Induction, Transition

Andrew Mearman, Emma Peasland and Anne Tallontire
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

This paper presents our reflection on a university-wide change to first-year student welcome accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. We draw on transition pedagogy (Kift), theories of organisational change (Kotter) and co-evolutionary theories of change (Foxon) and use data from an internal evaluation of welcome, which used primary data (e.g. interviews with academic staff responsible for the school-level roll out of welcome and induction) and routinely collected data (e.g. usage figures of the online resources). Plus auto-ethnographic accounts of actors in the processes of design, delivery and evaluation of the initiative.

The paper identifies three phases of the process – Understanding, Changing, and Extending – and reflects on the interactions between structures and agents in these stages. Despite the progress made in the Understanding and Changing stages, the embedding of new practice necessary for Extending is enabled by internal and external drivers to provide more inclusive education, but also shaped by pre-existing structures of the institution, such as departmental forms, communications channels and staff desires to preserve professional niches. We also note tensions between generic and specific needs of students, between trust and control, and between IT and human-based interventions. We consider steps to ensure that the Extending process is sustained and better embedded.

Student Diversity & Pandemic Resilience

Keywords: Beginners, Diversity and Inclusion, Transition

Nadine Syring, Annika Felix, Sarah Berndt, Judit Anacker & Anke Manukjan
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany

Students enter college with different socio-demographic characteristics, educational biographies, and experiences. This diversity conditions the transition from high school to college and thus integration. Additionally, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition takes place under changing conditions of digital or hybrid study, so student resilience to the pandemic situation equally takes on a significant role. Based on resilience, dropout, and COVID-19 pandemic research, this paper aims to investigate students’ COVID-19 pandemic resilience and its intersection with diversity criteria. For this purpose, a latent class analysis (LCA) is conducted to explore student types of COVID-19 pandemic resilience based on data from the student panel of the University of Magdeburg during the summer semester 2021 (N 1,120; response rate: 16.2%). Their stability compared to the summer semester 2020 (N 1,172; response rate 15.1%) is investigated by means of descriptive trend analyses. In addition, an analysis of the association between COVID-19 pandemic resilience types and diversity characteristics is performed using multinomial logistic regression.

 

Show and Tell Session A

ED Owl – gamifying learning using staff-student partnership

Keywords: Teaching Staff, Technology Enhanced Learning, Virtual / Hybrid Teaching and Learning

Nurun Nahar, Thomas Storey
University of Bolton, United Kingdom

There is a growing body of evidence highlighting the benefits of game-based learning to support learners in achieving specific learning goals. This research area is attracting a significant amount of interest from the scientific and educational community, particularly in recent times due to the massive shift to hybrid and blended learning approaches. With the rise in educational technology, instructors and those who create educational policy are interested in introducing innovative technological tools, such as video games, virtual worlds, and Massive Multi-Player Online Games (MMPOGs) (Buckless, 2014; Gómez, 2014) to study the effects of these on learners’ educational experience.
Taking a student –staff partnership approach, a game-based learning application called Ed Owl was developed and launched in February 2022 on a Business undergraduate programme at the University of Bolton. By integrating it with curriculum delivery, it is intended to benefit and foster digital interaction within the course and support formative assessment strategy in a blended learning context. It hosts a number of interactive games, designed to provide a scaffolded learning support to students. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of Ed Owl as a gamifying application and its impact on student’s learning experience. A focus group will be conducted at the end of April 2022 to report any potential benefits of gamifying learning for innovative pedagogical interventions.

Measures for Ensuring the Quality of Teaching at CAMPUS 02 UAS

Keywords: Teaching Staff, Support Services, Technology Enhanced Learning

Andrea Meier, Anastasija Lyubova
FH CAMPUS 02, Austria

Training the teaching staff is especially challenging at universities of applied sciences. A significant portion of the lecturers usually teach part-time while at the same time pursuing careers in their respective fields of work. In this contribution, we present the results of a survey on technology enhanced learning (TEL). The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) of CAMPUS 02 UAS implements services to support its heterogenous group of part-time teachers as well as full-time lecturers. They include services for creating educational videos, cross-curricular training series, and more. Despite all these efforts, collaboration between the CTE and the teaching staff could still be improved.
To find out what further measures the CTE can take to support the teaching staff in general and in developing and implementing TEL we conducted a survey among all part-time lecturers. The survey aims to investigate the respondents’ attitudes towards digital media and the implementation of TEL and find out which services provided by the CTE have already been used. We expect to not only learn about how TEL is and can be implemented, but also about the current digital literacy level of our teaching staff.

Study Smart – Introducing effective learning strategies

Keywords: Beginners, Student Engagement, Transition

Oscar van den Wijngaard
Maastricht University, the Netherlands

Did you know that 75% of the students use ineffective learning strategies when preparing for their exams and tutorials? When entering university, it is difficult to find a good study strategy. Based on decades of cognitive psychological research on learning, Maastricht University’s (UM) School of Health Professions Education and the UM Institute for Education Innovation (EDLAB) have identified a number of effective and ineffective learning strategies and designed the Study Smart programme, aiming to create awareness of, practice with, and reflection on effective learning strategies. After a number of successful pilots, the workshops are now offered at all UM faculties.

 

Show and Tell Session B

Expanding integrated student guidance by a mentorship program

Keywords: Beginners, Student Engagement, Transition

Marlinde Schoonbeek, Monique Quaedackers, Madelon Gijzel, Simone Schut, Annemoon Bregt, Jacco de Focket-Koefoed, Martine Koppenhol, Gönül Dilaver
Utrecht University, the Netherlands

During this session we hope to inspire you with our student-mentorship program, which attributes to an elaborate student guidance program (SGP) in which professionals intensively collaborate. The SGP includes a tutoring program in which academic professionals guide the students during their bachelor’s program in collaboration with several professionals from the faculty, such as student coaches, study counselors and career coaches. To further enhance student engagement and to facilitate the transition of first year students, we expanded the SGP with a mentorship program in which senior students guide first year students. The mentorship program is focused on wellbeing, community forming and sharing experiences in studying at the university.
In our session, we share the set-up of this mentorship program and how is integrated in the SGP of our bachelor’s program to mutually reinforce it. Next to this, we exchange experiences on student guidance programs in other institutes. In addition, we hope to discuss what aspects of guidance concerning social and academic integration suit better with a student-mentor or with a senior academic professional.

‚Do it (for) yourself‘: e-learning for a sustainable Study Guidance

Keywords: Beginners, Support Services, Technology Enhanced Learning

Kaat Terryn, Fran De Plecker
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

The two main goals of Study Guidance at VUB are to increase study efficiency and student wellbeing. As a consequence of Covid 19, guidance had to take place remotely. Therefore, a digital Study Guidance course environment was developed consisting of multiple modules on how to tackle study life. That way, all students had 24/7 online access to study related tips and tricks. Additionally, different learning tracks were created tailored to the different student populations, like first year students, lateral entrant students and so on.
This e-learning course environment has been integrated in a hybrid and stepwise guidance whereby: (1) students can get to work by themselves online, (2) students can participate in online and/or on campus group sessions and (3) students can receive individual guidance if further in-depth guidance is needed. For first year students specifically, a guidance program is organized in which study-related group sessions are embedded in the class schedule.
Thanks to the reconceptualization of the guidance offer, Study Guidance can respond quickly and efficiently to the diverse learning needs of all students.

The First-Year Integration Test: monitoring social and academic integration

Keywords: Beginners, Support Services, Transition

Veerle Vanoverberghe, Han Crevits
Artevelde University of Applied Sciences, Belgium

In many European countries, numerous first year students seem to struggle with their transition from secondary to higher education and fail or drop out before completion of their study programme. Research has demonstrated that students’ academic and social integration positively impact their study success in higher education.
To enhance features of academic and social integration, the Artevelde University of Applied Sciences offers all first-year students ‘process coaching’ within the curriculum. Coaches monitor academic and social integration using a newly developed instrument called the “First-Year Integration Test”, or “FIT”. Based on thorough qualitative research, this instrument was designed by Artevelde University of Applied Sciences and University of Antwerp, and it has proven to provide a reliable and valid image of a wide range of essential components of students’ social and academic integration.
Furthermore, FIT provides students with individual feedback on nine elements of academic integration and four elements of social integration. In this ‘show and tell’ session, we present FIT and show how coaches put it into practice.