Research in Further Education - Slides from our presentation at ALT C 2013

Research in Further Education - Presentation for ALT C 2013 from lessner

Dissemination events

Now that our webinar project is drawing to a close, we are moving into the dissemination phase. We will be reporting on and sharing our experiences at a number of JISC events during the next few weeks.

The first event is the JISC RSC South East event 'Employability Skills and Technology: Improving Outcomes for Learners' on Monday 22nd April at the Witney Campus of Abingdon & Witney College. We will be presenting during the morning session and running a workshop in the afternoon session.

This is a free event, if you wish to join us, please click here to find out more details and to book your place. Please note booking for this event closes on Wednesday 17th April 2013.

The second event is the following day, Tuesday 23rd April, when we will be heading to Birmingham to be involved in the Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group Meeting. We will be running a 30 minute session as part of the Members Showcase.

The third event is the JISC RSC South East Online Innovation Forum on Friday 10th May for further details about the session please click here.

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.

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.

Student posts - Why I joined the Students4webES Project

The reason why I got involved in the project Students4webES was because I wanted to find out more information about webinars. I found that using a webinar is cheaper and in some ways better to do meetings instead of travelling. I want to go into business in the future and this is very important for me, as it plays a critical role. The webinar project is really fun and once you get hold of the software that you will be using it becomes easy as well.

Post by Mamps Makuku
(Students4webES student)

I joined the project because I was intrigued with what a webinar was and how it could play apart in the world of work. Since I joined I have found out that as technology advances it is a lot cheaper to run webinars than it is to send people across the world for business meetings. Also it has helped me on a personal level because I now know how to make my CV and application forms stand out to an employer and how it can help me gain employability skills. These skills are now helping me in my application for apprenticeships. I would recommend the project to other students.

Post by Aaron Scott
(Students4webES student)

Employability skills baseline data

When we conducted our baseline assessment on for this project, we asked the students to write down three employability skills - the sort of skills they would list on their CV. We are in the process of analysing this data, but have created a Wordle to represent the 256 student responses that we received. At the end of the project we plan to compare the student responses with the skills that the employers mention in the up and coming webinars.

With a Wordle, the larger the word is the more times it was mentioned in the text, in this case the baseline assessment responses, as you can see the most frequently mentioned skills were:

• Hard working
• Team work
• Communication
• Reliable
• Punctual
• Organised 

It will be interesting to see how these compare when we have the data from all the employer webinars!


Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

First webinar completed!

On Monday we successfully ran our first webinar with an employer. Head of Staff Services at Abingdon and Witney College, Kelly Boast, gave a short presentation and took questions from students via Blackboard Collaborate.

The session was introduced and moderated by students from the core group and Kelly was supported in her office by another student from the core group. This was the first time that the students had put into practice their knowledge gained from the advanced webinar training session.

Below is a recording of the webinar, this is a screen capture recording of it as we had an issue with the Blackboard Collaborate recording not capturing the slide transitions. We only had a couple of minor technical issues during the recording, one when students posed questions via a speaker phone which caused an echo, however this was quickly resolved. The second issue was again with the sound, but this time a voice was slightly muffled towards the end of the recording, this was due to the microphone on a headset slipping.

We think our first employability webinar was a great success, we learnt a number of important lessons and feel confident that the following ones will be equally successful too!


Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

A few photos on PhotoPeach

Students4webES project photos on PhotoPeach



A few photos from the project meetings and advanced webinar training sessions. If your computer doesn't display the PhotoPeach please click here to see it.

Reflection in Action

Often during the course of a project, many issues can arise which require ‘thinking on your feet’ or to give it its proper name  ‘reflection in action’ (Schon, 1983). This project is no different, we have had to consider the situation and then make a decision based on what feels right at the time. Even if we have had a couple of days to think about the issue and decide on the best way forward, it is still decision making ‘in action’; there is no going back and starting again!

As we rapidly head towards the mid point of the project we have already made a number of these types of decisions – the best way to communicate, which software to use, how to form a ‘performing team’ from two groups of students…

An example of a decision that we have made during the project that might have been different with the benefit of hindsight, was the cohort of students the core group is made up from. The initial plan was to look for a group of 25 volunteer students from the second year level 3 students on the Futures Programme, run the initial training with the whole cohort and the advanced training with a volunteer core group. However this didn’t go according to plan. Having delivered a 15 minute session about the project to the initial cohort and asked for volunteers, we only received a handful of responses. We decided to open the project up to the first year students on the Futures Programme and the A level students too, to help us reach our 25 student target.

This decision did help us to recruit further students, some of whom are highly motivated, but  it also created a whole extra level of complexity to the project.

From this, timetabling constraints developed as the first years and second years have different days off college; one being a study day and the other a work day. The A level students have totally different timetables so it hasn’t been possible to have all the students meet face to face on the same day.

We now have two groups; one that meets on a Monday and the other on a Tuesday. So the question arises,  “How do you get the two groups to perform as a team when they don’t meet face to face?”  We are working on this at the moment, and using a Moodle course that they can use to contact each other and see what work has been completed. We have tried to facilitate virtual meetings, testing out different potential webinar platforms but this has been difficult to arrange and achieve due to the differing deadlines on each of the courses that the students are on. We will continue to try and pre-empt potential issues but I am sure there will be more ‘thinking on our feet’ to come before the end of this project!

References:

SCHÖN D A (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action London: Temple Smith

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Introduction to Webinar sessions

There are many challenges to running a JISC project in a FE college. For one thing, it's difficult to find a common time for people to meet. Unlike a university, where many/most students can get transport back to their halls or flats fairly easily, our students are dependent on parents, friends, buses to get home and often work as well as study.

We are using Moodle, SMS and email to communicate and we have weekly meetings during a 45 minute lunch break.

The good news is that we have had 3 weeks of an Introduction to Webinars for L3 students in the second year of the Professional Futures programme. The presenter, Owen Hanmer from the JISC RSC SE, along with an 'employer', Phil Robinson, also from the RSC, were in Kent, presenting to 3 groups in 3 different rooms while I did the introduction and summary in a 4th room, using Blackboard Collaborate. This gave the students a demonstration of a webinar platform, its use as a skill that might increase employability and useful information on what an employer looks for when hiring new staff. That reduces the number of students who didn't know what a webinar was!

Post by Ellen Lessner
Students4WebES Project Lead 

Infographic of baseline data on webinars

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Just getting started...

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Having started our project just over a month ago, on the 15^th October, we have recently recruited a volunteer group of students to work with us on our JISC Advance project – Students4WebES – here at Abingdon & Witney College. Our project is about Webinars and Employability skills and involves Level 3 students.

Our first session with the volunteer students and staff involved in the project, luckily coincided with the JISC online conference – Innovating e-Learning 2012: Shaping the future - which was so helpful when trying to explain what a webinar is and why they are becoming so popular.

We logged into a live session at the conference and briefly discussed what was happening and watched for a short period of time.  This made it so easy for the staff and students to gain a very quick overview of a webinar before attending one of the 3 introductory sessions being run on webinars for all the 2^nd year Level 3 students on our Professional Futures Programme. 

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager