Jisc Change Agent's Network Event

We are really pleased to be attending tomorrow's Jisc Change agent's network event in Birmingham. The event is held over two days and is a chance to hear about projects and meet people that are working on staff/student partnerships to improve innovation in curriculum.

The 2 day networking event showcases examples of change projects from across both the higher education and further education sectors. Our project will be represented on Wednesday 18th March in the session entitled "Market Place- showcasing student innovation".

If you are attending the event, we look forward to seeing you there!

Top tips for getting a job: 8 employers speak!

One of the aims of our Jisc embedding project was to build on the positive outcomes and outputs of our original webinar project and to highlight the key employability skills identified in webinars by the employers who took part.

Below is a short video that contains some top tips for applying for a job, CVs and participating in an interview. It would be a useful starter for a tutorial on CVs or interviews. The clips are taken from the original 8 student run webinars we recorded during our first phase of the project.

 

We hope you like the video, please do share and let us know if you have found it useful!

Check out our new video!

Below is a video overview of our project. Please watch and share!

   

Created by Ellen Lessner, Project Lead, using Videoscribe.

Let the planning begin!

Earlier this week we were in London for a meeting with Owen Hanmer, from Jisc.  The purpose of the meeting was to start planning our course on learning to set up and run a webinar. Owen ran a number of training sessions on webinar skills during the original Students4webES project and was an obvious choice to help us in the planning of this course.

We arrived in London for our meeting and the first thing that struck me about the meeting room  was that it was all set up perfectly for webinars and teleconferencing.

In the middle of the room, suspended above the table was a microphone, perfectly placed for capturing everything being discussed and on one wall a set of screens and a video camera again perfectly arranged to capture the meeting and fully support 'virtual participation'.

Fuelled by a number of cups of coffee we managed to put together a draft outline of the course. It is clear that it will continue to evolve over the coming weeks, but it is great to have a first draft down on paper (well actually on a shared Google Doc)!

The course will be built as a downloadable Moodle course with resources and activities for a blended learning delivery. We estimate the course will be about 20 hours of learning, but this could well change once we start to investigate getting the course accredited for funding.

Next stop: another meeting, this time with a video editor to look at improving the webinar recordings and to produce a more polished version of the top tips student produced video.

FELTAG Report and funding cuts

Having presented during the FE strand at ALT-C 2013 when the FELTAG open consultation session was run we were eager to read the Report that was published last Monday. FELTAG is the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group, convened by Minister of State for Skills and Enterprise, Matthew Hancock at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

Obviously a report that discusses the future use of technology in FE is highly relevant to our project. The timing of this report and the announcement that the government is cutting funding to ‘low value’ courses will allow us to reflect on both of these points whilst shaping the webinar employability course that we are designing for L2 and L3 students.

The aim of our course will be to teach a technology skill; the setting up and running of a webinar. We feel that the hard and soft skills needed to do this will help students be more successful in looking for employment both now and in the future. Our goal is to find a way to make the course fundable by validating the delivery through an awarding body accepted in the post-16 community. As the FELTAG report suggests, a proportion of the course will be delivered online and we are looking at putting the assessment online as well.

FELTAG recommends that “the funding system must fully support the adoption of new digital technology and learning methods….” (p. 23). This short course should tie in nicely with many of the recommendations for funding. We will keep you posted on how we get on.

Set up and run a webinar: Learn a 21st Century Employability Skill

Ellen Lessner and Emma Procter-Legg will be speaking at the Jisc RSC Event "Technology, Innovation and Success - A conference for ACL and WBL" on the 28th March 2014 at Senate House, University of London.

Our session "Set up and run a webinar: Learn a 21st Century Employability Skill" will look at the lessons learned from our original project on webinars and employability skills run at Abingdon & Witney College. It is also a chance for us to showcase our (draft) blended learning course on setting up and running a webinar as an employability skill. The development of this freely available short course will form one of the major outputs of our embedding project. The funding for this is from the Jisc FE and Skills Embedding Activity Programme.

Why not come along to our session and have a chat with us about our project!

We are back - our extension bid was successful!

In January 2014, we received the good news that we had been successful in our bid for an extension of our original project via the Jisc FE and Skills Development and Resources Programme – Embedding Activity. We will be back blogging regularly about our activities, outputs and achievements over the next months.

The project officially starts again on Monday 3rd March so look out for more posts about our project aims and plans!

Student Produced Video

Students4WebES update, below is a student produced video about the key points on employability skills from the employers involved in our project.

Video produced by Ben Robb, a media student at Abingdon and Witney College in 2013. Although a bit rough, it shows that employers had similar ideas about what employers think are key employability skills.

Slides from Elesig 2013 webinar on Evolving Digital literacies: inductions to employment skills

Elesig 2013 webinar on Evolving Digital literacies: inductions to employment skills from lessner

Students' Top Tips for Running a Webinar

Below is the student produced guide to webinars that was produced as part of the Students4webES project.

A pdf copy of the poster is available on our project website to download. Click here to visit the website, scroll down the resources page until you see the poster section, see image below, then click download on the final version called StudentguideFinal.pdf.

Leave us a comment and let us know what you think of the poster!

Prezi presentation

Student centred guide to running a webinar

Having completed our first main output of the Students4webES project - the 8 recorded webinars with employers about employability skills - it is time to move onto working on the other key outputs.

With the conference date set and the event management team on board we have moved onto our final output - the student centred guide to running webinars.

The core group of students involved in the project decided that the guide would appeal to students if it was in the form of a poster. After a long design meeting, which involved deciding on the content and format of the poster, we celebrated by eating lots of pizza at Pizza Express.

Last week we held two photo shoots to capture some images to go on the poster. Luckily Ben, an A level media studies student in the core group, brought his camera along to the second session and we managed to take some nice photos.

Below are a few of the photos taken during the photo shoot...

... but you will have to wait until the April 22nd, the date of the conference, to find out which ones made it into the poster!

Conference date and details

Students4webES Project will be taking part in and hosting the JISC RSC South East event 'Employability Skills and Technology: Improving Outcomes for Learners' on April 22nd at the Witney Campus of Abingdon & Witney College. Below is a brief overview of the event, as described on the JISC Advance website:

"Learning providers are increasingly being challenged to ensure that learners are equipped with a range of skills to prepare them for the world of work. This event will provide an opportunity to share ideas, solutions and best practice in the way technology can provide some innovative ways to develop employability skills." 


This is a free event, if you wish to join us, please click here to find out more details and to book your place.

Active Nation webinar

Dave Rolls, Centre Manager at the Whitehorse Leisure and Tennis Centre which is run by Active Nation, took part in our fifth student-run webinar.
This webinar was produced using Webex, our previous webinars have so far been recorded using BlackBoard Collaborate. For technical reasons, at short notice, we had to switch to using Webex to run the webinar.

The two students that ran the webinar had previously only been trained in using Blackboard Collaborate so it was a great test of their general understanding of webinars to run it using Webex for the first time. I hope you will agree that they did a great job!

The Spa at the Lygon Arms Webinar

Alice Walker, Head Therapist at the Spa at the Lygon Arms, Broadway part of the Puma Hotel Group, participated in our second student run webinar. Alice took part in the webinar by logging onto a computer at the Witney campus of Abingdon & Witney College, whilst the students running it were at the Abingdon campus.  A group of beauty students and their lecturers from the college also participated in the webinar from another room, asking a number of questions via the chat window.

Alice Walker, Head Therapist at the Spa at the Lygon Arms

Abey took the role of speaker which involved introducing and thanking Alice for her participation in the webinar.

Whilst Armna took the role of moderator.

Although this was our second student run webinar it was the first time either student had been involved in running one with an employer.

Below is a recording of the webinar, which proved to be a great success not only for the core students running the webinar but also for the beauty students participating in it. The beauty students had so many questions to ask that we stopped the recording and allowed them to continue their conversation with Alice.

The BBC reports on the rise of the Skype interview

The BBC recently reported on the rise in use of Skype and other video conferencing software for job interviews. This rise fits with our own research that showed 16.4% of the 256 students we asked had had a job interview by phone or video conferencing. 

The article discusses the benefits and issues around online interviews and outlines a number of top tips on how to prepare for them. This included the advice of sitting in front of a plain background, which one of our recent webinar guest speakers did, see our NUS webinar post, as you can see this worked very well and helped the audience to focus on the presenter.

To read the BBC article 'Skype interviews: Is it more tricky to be grilled by video?' click here.

Waitrose webinar

Last week Linda Phillips, HR manager at Waitrose Abingdon, participated in a webinar with students from Abingdon and Witney College.

Linda Phillips, HR manager, Waitrose Abingdon

Linda and her colleague Gen Allen visited the Abingdon campus to take part in the webinar and to meet staff and students involved in the project.

Gen Allen

Linda was supported by Ben during the webinar, one of three students involved in running the webinar.

To see more about the 'behind the scenes' running of this webinar check out our other blog post by clicking here and do watch the recording of the webinar below!

The importance of consent forms

A while back we wrote a blog post on consent forms and photographs, where we mentioned the need for consent forms from all project participants.

One of the early tasks that we gave students involved in the Students4webES project was to research and produce a draft consent form. We then checked it over before asking them all to sign it as well as all of the employers involved in the webinars. We have found that it is best to send the consent form out at the same time as sending the employers further details about the format of the webinar and general information about the project.

Below is a video of one of the students talking about the importance of the consent form for our project.

Guest post: Ellen Lessner Students4webES Project Leader

Since it’s over half way through our project, I thought I’d spend a little bit of time reflecting on how it’s going. One thing that stands out is the difference between writing a bid and running a project. For those of you who have run projects, this won’t be a surprise. I thought I had enough experience to write a realistic bid but I hadn’t appreciated how much time it takes to coordinate the timetables of several diverse groups; students, employers, rooms, project managers and leaders. A 6 month project like ours needs to get going very quickly and if I was going to do it again, I would have extended the project timetable to take that into account.

We have had interest and support from a number of employers and we will have some good webinar recordings on employability skills to show for it. I realise that many employers don’t know what a webinar is, not just the 94% of our student sample! Some of the people we approached don’t have the ability to run the software on their work network nor do they have guest wifi access so that we could bring our laptop to them to record the session. We can overcome this by offering to host them at the college. Of course, some employers are using webinars regularly and they will have something to say to students that will be particularly useful. It does appear that having the skill to set up and run a webinar is as valuable (and rare) an employability skill to have on a CV as we thought when we put the project together.

I am pleased that our Professional Futures programme is now offering the ’Introduction to webinar’ session as part of the Core Tutorial programme for first year students. It gives all the students an opportunity to get ahead with their understanding of how useful the technology can be in their future. We should be able to train those who are interested in learning how to moderate a webinar session as well. Our JISC RSC SE (many thanks to Owen Hanmer) has put together such good training for us, that the recording of the ‘Introduction’ and the ‘Advanced’ sessions make it easy for us (Core Student group and staff) to teach others – when we have completed our employer webinars.

If you want to know how we did, keep 22 April free and look for information on this blog about the JISC RSC SE Employment Conference which will be held on our Witney Campus. The planning has begun and there will be a session with students, staff and maybe an employer, who have worked on this project reporting in.

Ellen Lessner
Project Leader, Students4WebES

A Tweet about our Project

We had a tweet from Donna Christopher, an e-learning marketing executive @ Blackboard Collaborate, see screenshot below!

We couldn't agree more!