UCA Creative Education Network

This post was created by PGCert participants as part of their assessment for Unit 1 of the course. The brief was to choose two specific learning needs and evaluate technologies that could help students with these needs to learn more effectively.

Individuals with dyslexia face a range of challenges during higher education courses, particularly during tasks which require intensive reading and writing. OneNote software has various functions which could be useful for some dyslexic students. Microsoft advertises the app as a ‘free organizer-productivity notebook app’, and it does have some features which certainly could help students with particular forms of dyslexia become more productive.

The immersive reader and accessibility functions responds to many of the issues highlighted by the British Dyslexia Association (BDA, 2018) as challenges for those with dyslexia, including producing:

• Readable fonts (e.g. spacing between letters, avoiding ‘visual crowding’)
• Easy addition of headings and sub-headings
• Appropriate colour contrasts

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The university has recently introduced a new personal development policy across all UCA courses, but why have we introduced this, what does this mean for the student experience and how are we going to implement this?

Why have we introduced Personal Development Tutoring?

At UCA, we annually monitor student retention data, reporting on patterns of interruption and withdrawal across the student lifecycle.  These studies have revealed particular attrition issues around level 4, where students are at greatest risk of dropping out of their studies with us.  There may be a variety of reasons why students drop out at this stage.  Academic issues, feelings of isolation and/or not fitting in and concern about achieving future aspirations as the primary reasons why students think about leaving. In 2018, we conducted in-house research on the first year experience (Barratt, 2018) BAME student experience (Dixon-Smith, 2018) and Induction Tutoring (Allder & Fitzwater, 2018).  All of these studies reveal the value and benefit of ongoing pastoral support to enable students navigate university life and work life balance to achieve success in their studies.

So..what is personal development tutoring? Continue reading →

There are often varied interpretations and understandings, held by students and academics, on what is feedback, how feedback is defined (ie difference between formative and summative) and how this can inform learning.  From the student perspective, most complaints focus on the technicalities of feedback, including content, organization of assessment activities, timing, and lack of clarity about requirements (Higgins, Hartley, & Skelton, 2001), and from the lecturer perspective, the issues revolve around students not making use of or acting on feedback.  Rather disappointingly, these extrinsic aspects of assessment and feedback practice continue to dominate the National Student Survey (NSS).  Such perceptions and experiences of the assessment and feedback process can sometimes mean that students are unaware or unappreciative of formative assessment experiences as opportunities for learning, instead fixating on the assessment process: the turnaround of marks, the costs of involved to produce work for assessment and the perceived lack of fairness with grades and feedback. These experiences often mask the potential of formative assessment to shift learners away from extrinsic motivation towards intrinsic motivation and autonomous learning. Continue reading →