In the first part↗️ of this blog post, Fiona McNeill, Ojaswee Bajracharya and Charlie Myszkowski highlighted student experiences of the transition from the Personal Tutor System to the new Cohort Model. In this second part, the authors share their reflections and lesson learned from their research on a cohort-based system. Fiona McNeill is a Reader in Computing Education, Ojaswee Bajracharya is a 4th-year Computer Science student, and Charlie Myszkowski is a 2nd-year Cognitive Science student at the School of Informatics. This post belongs to the Hot Topic series: Student Partnership Agreement 2023↗️.
Our research into the transition from the Personal Tutor System to the new Cohort Model has been extremely helpful for us to understand what our students want from a cohort-based system, and how we could adapt to support them better.
We are currently working with any students we have identified who were working closely with their Personal Tutor (PT) to ensure their transition to their Student Advisor (SA) is smooth. The research outlined in our first blog post shows that there should be fewer problems with SA interactions than with PT, but we need to work with SAs to make sure they can bring in Course Leaders with course-based questions.
Current cohort activities are not as polished as we would like because we are introducing a lot all at once, but our intentions going forward are:
- To focus on meaningful group activities, to foster learning and community building by doing.
- To pay attention to crunch points in the semester to make it easier for students to attend, and to vary times sessions are at so that at least one will suit a wide range of students.
- To focus on how we communicate with our students about events, both to raise awareness of what will be happening and to be really clear about what students would gain from attending. We are looking into utilising social media channels more effectively and considering hiring a student intern to help with this. The intention of this would be not just to highlight cohort activities but to create a streamlined view of all Informatics-related activity.
- Ensure that there are a range of opportunities that suit a wide range of students, providing plenty of opportunities for the most popular activities such as hackathons but not focussing on them exclusively.
- Ensure that there are opportunities for students to engage with people in industry, especially alumni, and with students in other years.
- Build in more opportunities for whole school activities where staff and students can mix and learn more from each other. We had our first Discover Informatics event in early November. This involved a range of people in the school (academics at all levels, students at all levels, professional services) giving lightening talks about what they do and why it’s exciting, followed by wine and nibbles. It was very well attended by students, and has been one of the most successful events we’ve run this year.
- Provide food!
- Work to introduce digital badges next session, which is explained in more detail below.
Future research: Incentivising extra-curricula activities through a digital badge system.
In this SPA-funded project, we were intending to introduce a digital badge system for our cohort-based activities. This would have had a two-fold benefit. Firstly, it would have given students tangible benefits for attending and engaging with activities. For example, badges would have evidenced development of transferrable skills, which could then be exported to a LinkedIn profile. The second benefit would be that, to achieve the badge, attendance alone would not be sufficient; students would also be asked to engage by developing ideas for improving existing sessions or creating new ones, so that over time our activities would become highly student led. Both these benefits would indicate to students that we valued these activities and the time they devoted to them.
This initiative did not happen this year due to logistical challenges in implementing the badges, but it is something we would hope to implement in future years. Instead, we explored how our students would respond to the possibility of this initiative as part of this research.
In general, the response to this was positive. Students said that they felt this would be helpful for making the effort they put into activities feel recognised, and it ties into comments above about getting something tangible out of their engagement. Improving CVs is a key focus for students, and they were enthusiastic about badges that could support that.
It was clear from their comments that, to be successful, such incentivisation would have to be meaningful. Students were not interested in meaningless symbols; they wanted to understand how a badge would improve their CV and how they could use it to evidence skills to employers. It would also need to be a fairly low overhead. Students mostly indicated that they would be prepared to engage in meaningful activities to earn badges but mundane activities, or things that could easily be forgotten like tracking their own attendance, would be off-putting. As some students were not interested in working towards earning badges, this would need to be an optional addition to extra-curricula activities.
Summary
In summary, this research has been very helpful in developing our understanding of what the two student support models look like from a student point of view, and how we might more effectively build community and enhance student skills through activities within the school. Getting students to engage with non-core activities is never going to be a fully solved problem because students are busy and there are so many things competing for their time. Nonetheless, carrying out this project has helped us put steps in place that we are hopeful will lead to significantly higher student engagement and good student satisfaction. We intend to continue analysing our approach to determine how well we are achieving this, and how we can continue to improve.
Fiona McNeill
Fiona is a Reader in Computing Education in Informatics. My research focusses on access to CS and STEM education for young people from diverse backgrounds, and on student support in university.
Ojaswee Bajracharya
Ojaswee is a 4th year Computer Science student. She is an Informatics Student Ambassador and has contributed to various societies and initiatives, including serving as the Treasurer of the Edinburgh University Programming Society from 2022-2023 and as the Director of Hello World Hack 2023. Ojaswee’s primary interest is in software engineering, but she also has a strong interest in enhancing the student support system and improving the overall informatics student experience.
Charlie Myszkowski
Charlie is a 2nd year Cognitive Science student. He is Co-President of TEDxUniversityofEdinburgh, a student society, and a Student Content Creator for the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences. His interests lie in promoting the wellbeing of students, their confidence in sharing their ideas, and in improving the university experience for him and his fellow students.
Olivia Liseth
Olivia Liseth is currently going into her 3rd year as an illustration student at the Edinburgh College of Art. She likes to make smooth, “designed” illustrations with markers and pencils, and loves drawing landscapes and buildings more than anything else. You can find her on Instagram @olivialiseth_art.
