Dr Victoria Wright, University of Wolverhampton
I work as Head of Post Compulsory Education at the University of Wolverhampton. During the pandemic, courses moved from face to face to online and blended. Of particular interest to me was the way in which we supported students accessing and participating in online spaces. My infographic focuses on one course in particular – a Masters course in Professional Practice. I have considerable experience on the course and have (pre-Covid) taught and managed the provision as a face to face learning experience. In moving to online teaching (Covid-19), we were all pushed (as HEIs, as education professionals) to think again and often to think differently about our approaches to digital teaching and learning. What opportunities were now available to us and how did we recontextualise some of our practices? I have taken two SEDA (Staff and Educational Development Association) courses in Learning to Tutor Online and Digital Transformations within the last two years. It is some of the insights I have gained in to my practices during and since taking those courses that I wish to share in my infographic.
Initially when the pandemic struck, our Masters course was taught face to face, part time on Saturdays. In the pandemic it was still taught part time on Saturdays but it moved in to MS Teams and our Virtual Learning Environment as the two spaces in which students would interact with each other and with staff. One of the early interventions in support of the student experience was to timetable informal catch-up slots as of potential benefit to students as a group. These were hosted in support of their wellbeing and in recognition of the need to reinforce that we (the tutors) were still present and available to them. Tutorials have always been freely available but it is perhaps worth emphasizing the value of this approach in addition to taught sessions. The course itself was revalidated in 2020 2021 as wholly online and the model has therefore developed even further. The initial ‘coffee catch-up’ has developed in to dedicated workshop time each week in addition to the taught Saturday sessions of the course.
My examples for the infographic relate specifically to the virtual learning environment, to my attempts to support students in navigating a module site in the context of online only provision and to the use of video clips through which to support their understanding of the module and the assignment.