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!

Coverage on JACKfm radio station today!

The Students4webES project is being featured today (Thursday 7th February) on JACK fm in the Oxfordshire business reports. The report is aired every hour and rolls around three different stories so listen out at 11 to see if we feature then or in the next slot at 12 on 106JACKfm today!

Update: Students4webES project was mentioned at 12:04, so we expected it will be featured again around  3pm and then again around 6pm and 9pm tonight. Do listen out for it if you get a chance!

Slides from BETT

JISC project AWC Students for Webinar Employability Skills - BETT 2013 V2 from lessner

Webinar booked in with Head Therapist at the Spa at Lygon Arms

We have just confirmed another employer for a webinar this week! On Thursday 7th February students will be running a webinar with Alice Walker, Head Therapist at the Spa at the Lygon Arms, Broadway (part of the Puma Hotel group), she will be talking to students about employability skills for beauty therapists.
We will keep you posted on how it goes!

Photo from BETT

Ellen Lessner Students4webES Project leader presented at BETT last Friday, in the session Who are digital practitioners?

This photo was very kindly taken by Robert Fekete

We will make the slides from the presentation available and post them on here soon! 

A mention in the Oxfordshire Guardian South newspaper

The Students4webES project is mentioned in this week's Oxfordshire Guardian South newspaper. A copy of the it arrived through my letter box this morning!

 

If you don't manage to get hold of a copy, you can read it online here http://www.trimediagroup.co.uk/digital-editions/ click through and scroll down to select Oxfordshire Guardian South and check out page 14.

Post by Emma Procter-Legg