Feedback from the workshop session Supporting Students at Scale at the UKAT Annual Conference 2021
The next academic year will see the rise of a blended model of academic delivery meaning the physical distance between tutors and students is here to stay, regardless of the pandemic. For many courses, the digital world will be key to teaching and learning, raising challenges for tutors about how support is accessed and delivered to their students throughout the programme.
Increased pressures
The pivot to online learning has created a seismic shift for tutors and a fundamental change to the student experience. The loss of face-to-face teaching and corridor conversations has limited the line of sight on how students are doing. Making it harder for tutors to know who is engaging and students requiring not only more support but for a broader range of reasons.
It also makes the ability to offer timely and relevant personal tutoring difficult to navigate; How do you know who is disengaged and in need of additional support? How do you know who would benefit from an extra push to help gain higher attainment? How can you ensure outreach at scale to ensure every student has a chance to succeed?
There is a shift in personal tutoring delivery
At the UKAT Annual Conference 2021 we addressed the changing needs of students in this new environment, the challenges tutors face in meeting expectations from a distance, online and at scale and looked at ideas for improving the experience for both students and staff in an interactive workshop.
20 representatives of personal academic tutors from UK universities took part in the discussion. All attendees identified with similar issues relating to the need to deliver more with less, the need to increase student contact time and having to evolve to deal with a new set of student and institutional expectations.
Feedback suggests that there is more to be done to create a closer and more accessible tutor student relationship. On and offline spaces dedicated to tutoring groups and enabling shared experiences would be a good way to initiate that. Many also seek to gain a better understanding of engagement across the academic learning landscape to enable more informed outreach.
You can view the findings and feedback from the session by downloading the briefing document.
Using engagement analytics to scale support
Looking forward and it is clear both teaching and learning will further fragment. There must be a solution to managing the touchpoints and interactions with students on campus, online, across multiple digital systems to understand a) what engagement looks like for your cohort, b) know when and how to support your learners and c) stand a chance of organising and prioritising workload and time to provide the outreach students need.
Students also have a part to play in this relationship, as independent learners it is important that they too have a level of understanding of what is expected from them, knowing when to reach out, how they are performing and where to go for support. Sharing engagement data with students was viewed positively in the session, providing a common understanding that can aid more informed conversations between tutor and student.
Engagement analytics supports proactive and non-biased outreach, transparency, partnership working and quality conversations between students and their tutors. Find out how Solutionpath can help your engagement strategy.
Feedback from the workshop session Supporting Students at Scale at the UKAT Annual Conference 2021 The next academic year will see the rise of a blended model of academic delivery meaning the physical distance between tutors and students is here to stay, regardless of the pandemic. For many courses, the digital world will be key to […]
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