Jay Rixon is a Senior Manager in Access, Open and Cross-curricular Innovation and responsible for the MA or MSc Open qualification and works on Student Hub Live. 

I feel at this point of the year I am still looking back as much as I am looking forward, and I’m about to come to a big milestone: it is almost a year for OU colleagues like myself since we packed up our desks, created new offices in kitchens, lounges and bedrooms, switched on our cameras and started working from home, although I know this is a way of working so many of our tutors and students have already embraced.

I look back on the past 12 months being part of the Student Hub Live (SHL) team and see so many things to be proud of. Over this past year we have seen a massive increase in demand for our sessions: what we so value about SHL is the ability to act quickly and support our students to be part of an academic community. Right from the get-go, as the pandemic unfolded, we tweaked sessions and added new ones and as we could no longer use our snazzy studio on campus, we  had to produce remote sessions via the magic of technology, that gave us more flexibility, and dare I say it, more creativity. Images of Karen at home on the couch leading a SHL session, with her faithful dogs beside her, and colleagues beaming in from their homes, will stay with me as something so unique to that season.

Image of three colleagues wearing headsets on Student Hub Live remote broadcast

The SHL team have found so many OU colleagues eager to participate in sessions on such pertinent topics such as:

• Looking after your wellbeing and nailing your studies
• Building your own self-care and wellbeing recipe
• Motivation and productivity – practical tools for tapping into the brain’s reward system

As we have journeyed through the year, we have had a few network issues as well as  dodgy connection issues, and of course a few special guests in the form of cats and dogs – throughout it all we really have kept the show on the road.

What’s more, we were able to release new outputs in the SHL family such as podcasts, which we host through Podbean. We started with a timely session called, ‘Online social: un-distancing’, where we shared that despite being apart we were still together in so many ways.

We have more podcasts being rolled out soon as well so that not only can our students engage in these sessions live, but now take them offline, listening to us while going for a walk and taking that all-important screen break and getting some fresh air.

An image of a wood with the sun coming through the trees

We now have many ways for our students to participate with SHL Remote broadcast sessions (some get edited and turned into Podcasts) as well as our workshop sessions (hosted via Adobe Connect). Sessions are promoted via our Student Hub Live website and we also have our YouTube channel which has so much amazing content on it that can be dipped into and explored. To help you with this we do have a few playlists (and coming soon, a really exciting piece of work going on – but I’ll save that for another blog post!)

Our student engagement is so important to us as it helps us to continue to develop and innovate. At a SHL session held as part of the Student Voice Week (#OUStudentVoiceWeek) in late 2020, students shared with us what they liked and valued about SHL. What came back was the need for community, for friendly voices at the end of the computer, for content to be relevant, informative and current. For a community feel, and to be with other students for that opportunity to be networked as part of a larger community but not to feel like you are in a classroom.

We also asked whether being part of the SHL community positively impacted on their studies and our students said it keeps them motivated, that sense of community and belonging makes a real difference, and it helps people feel like proper students, and the sense of community and support is valued as are the tips and tricks to help with studying.

As we move forward through this year, the SHL team will continue to think of new ideas, new outputs and different approaches to what we do to support the student body that we are so proud of.

If you have ideas for SHL sessions, why not tweet us at @StudentHubLive (#SHL21)

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