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
