PRAXIS joint seminar with Gothenburg University

Chris Kubiak: Online communities, well I’m not going to say much about online communities, because one of my things I’m proposing is that belonging is much more than an online community, and in this case a sense of belonging doesn’t really relate to interacting with other students. So, Claire is right, I’m talking about student carers, and I’m looking at the relationship between retention and belonging, and I’m going to reframe some work we’ve done through the lens of belonging.

So, to start off with then, I don’t know, I’ll just quickly define carers. So carers are people who provide unpaid and essential care to a friend or a family member. So it might be that your partner becomes sick and they need care. It might be that your mother becomes unsteady on their feet and can’t look after herself anymore and so you quit your job and you move home and you now look after her all the time. Or it might be that your son has mental health problems, and you can hang onto a job, but you still need to do an awful lot of care to look after him. And you can guess that the situation can be fairly challenging because there’ll be several disadvantages associated with it, and health and wellbeing and finances and educational attainment and so on. And, in the UK, we have one in four people are carers. So this is a number that’s leapt up in recent years.

So what about in universities? Well here’s the probably. The Office for Students in the UK doesn’t count the number of carers, so students can’t declare whether or not they’re a carer. So we don’t really know nationwide. We do where we are, we can count, and my estimate is about one in 20, so about 5% or so. The thing is that the Office for Students makes it a widening participation priority, but most university plans are nascent, so people really haven’t got on the case with this. Add to this research is limited. Nevertheless, my colleague, Mary Larkin, and I scooped up everything that we could find that had been written, and we’ve published an article on carers in higher education called Carers in Higher Education. So we’re trying to build up the research base in this area.

So I want to talk about, so we have carers and they come to university, and in our case they come to distance university to study from a distance, and what I wanted to do is ask the primary question, which is how do we keep them here? How do we make sure they finish their modules, how do we make sure they pass their courses and how do we make sure they get their degrees? And there’s lots and lots of different ways we can look at retention. And these first three perspectives that I’ve highlighted here about skills and motivation, engagement and resilience, and in a sense these are fairly predominant ways of thinking about hanging onto students who are having a bad time of it. So, in my past job, I was associate head of school, I’d got to a module Chair and I’d say, I’ve been looking at your statistics and I can see that 40% of your students fail, 30% of your students drop out before they get to the final assignment, this is a problem. And we’ll talk about what’s going on.

Generally speaking that module chair will say to me something like well, you know, lots and lots of my students left school without A-levels and so they really haven’t got the skills to study at this level. Some of them will say well what can I expect, they don’t come to tutorials! So their argument is that these students aren’t engaged with this study. The students aren’t doing all the activities. Or some module chairs will say well we do everything we can to bolster them, to support them, to help them deal with the difficulties. So we do things to build up student resilience, we connect them to other students in the forums, we give them mentors who can support them, we connect them to the Students’ Association.

So these are the three predominant perspectives on student resilience a word that they buzz around, in some ways I would argue that one of the predominant themes at the moment is engagement. These other views of retention which stress belonging, that actually if you dig into them what they’re really saying is that students drop out, students don’t make it to the end because they have the sense of dislocation within the setting, within the university, they feel they don’t fit in. So you’re probably familiar with Bourdieu and his ideas of habitus field and capital. I’ll give you an example.

So a couple of years ago my daughter was 16. She thought it’d be a nice idea if her and her friend could get on a train and go to London. Went to London, went straight to the West End, bought a day ticket to the theatre, then went and had a nice lunch in a decent place to eat, went to the theatre, bought drinks, bought interval drinks waiting for her. When you think about what she’s doing there, my daughter demonstrated a range of social, intellectual and cultural capital that she could work out the notion of a day ticket and how to belong in a theatre and how to get a cheap theatre ticket because she’s only 16 she hasn’t got a lot of money. So in the same way when students come to university some have the social and intellectual capital to get by at university, and they feel a fit. Bourdieu says like a fish in water, they don’t feel the weight of the water, they feel like they belong. So for example my daughter understands how to write a good essay now she’s at university. And she has the social capital to ring me up and send me some of her work and say how does this look?

The problem with Bourdieu’s perspective and the way that actually these ideas of habitus field and capital have been embraced in higher education is that if we say it’s a matter of having capital then there’s an argument that there are some students who represent deficit, they don’t have the capital. They don’t have what they need to get by and of course students aren’t deficits. So Yosso working from critical race theory wrote about community cultural way, well, arguing that the issue here isn’t that some people are deficits, but rather some people are operating in systems that aren’t signed for them. They don’t fit here, rather than they don’t have capital, and Yosso proposed six types of capital. So pursuing this idea of fit and a sense of belonging kind of brings me to Tinto’s work.

So Tinto’s work pre-dates Yosso’s work, but in a sense has become the paradigmatic view of retention. And underneath all of this is this idea of fit, of feeling like you belong in a place. So Tinto argues that the students who stick it out are those who integrate socially with the environment. They feel a fit with the norms and morays and values of the organisation. They develop relationships with people there. They also feel they can do the work. They’ve academic integration. They have the skills to do the work. They’re capable of doing the work. The work feels like it’s worth doing. And the last one is career, they see this as taking them, the study is taking them somewhere where they want to be.

So this model has been pretty much critiqued. In some cases the critiques I think have represented wilfulness understanding of it. So originally Tinto said, you get these students, you bring them in, if they drop out, they haven’t adjusted properly, they’re maladjusted students. By about 2006, even 1994 Tinto was saying well actually we need to see this differently, we need to adapt to our students. So, students, this is not a fit, it doesn’t necessarily mean that students don’t need to adjust, but we actually need to adjust to our students.

The other critique has been for social integration which argues that this really only applies to those Dead Poet Society institutions, you know, the film where students are cycling to class through the autumn leaves, reading poetry in caves with their classmates; in distance learning none of this happens. In fact in commuter institutions none of this happens. But at the same time the values and the norms of the institution still have an effect. So I went into looking at student carers in higher education using Tinto’s model of student integration. Using that as an analytic frame to consider how well they get on. And it’s a two-phased project.

So over the two phases we eventually interviewed 60 students. In the second phase we interviewed student from across the faculties and I’ve identified those on the right. Most of them are undergraduates, because postgraduates are too busy for interviews, and we found that 45% of them were caring for more than two people, and we conducted thematic analysis. So what do we find and how did it relate to belonging? Well, the first thing that we did find was that like carers elsewhere they’re not having an easier time of it: they too are providing the range of support that I’m presenting on this slide and it’s impacting on their health, their wellbeing, their educational attainment, their employments and so on. But what happened when they got into higher education?

Well, first of all, they were an interesting bunch in terms of motivation, only 33% of them were in employment and only a small percentage were studying for employability. What most of them said is that they’re studying in effect to transcend caring. While there were some who were saying things like well I want to take my experience and forge a career in health and social care so that is my experience of caring, my experience of study, I could get a job as a social worker. Most of them were developing passions developing the other side of themselves. They wanted to become a different kind of person. They wanted to transcend their relationships. And so the Open University was a place where they felt they could feel a fit with that aspect of themselves. The interesting thing about it is that their ability to study, to take on study or take on distance learning study was partly enabled by the fact that they were caring. So, if you’ve quit your job so you can provide care, studying is something you can do in the spaces in between, unlike other sorts of activity like working.

What about academic integration? I describe these students as students of the gaps. So they were time poor. Caring responsibilities are unpredictable, you never quite know whether you’ll find that your relative has disappeared and you need to go look for them or they’ve suddenly become sick. You need to be there on site. And on top of that there’s an emotional overhead to it and the work can be upsetting. And so these students found gaps in the middle, gaps in the space where they could do the work. Now this runs counter to typical study advice which says you’ve got to find your schedule and your routine and you’ve got to stick with your schedule. So these students really just found spaces in between often going with the flow.

The most interesting thing about the students and this set of data is that extensions were a hugely significant theme for them. That is if they couldn’t meet their assignment deadlines, did they ask for extensions? Most of the students, most of the people we interviewed, only about a third of them tended to use extensions; the others didn’t use extensions. And they were quite adamant about why they didn’t. They talked about how, I’m not this kind of person, I don’t want to create this kind of impression to my tutor, my brain doesn’t work like this. So in a sense in the way that they managed their workload, they kind of manifested a fit, they found a fit with the way we operate.

So the third thing, so what’s the relevance between this and belonging? So, in some ways, academic integration could be about us redesigning our academic structure to accommodate students of the gaps. We could change the way we design our modules and I can talk about that at the end. But for most of these students they’re employing quite a high degree of navigational capital. So they were very careful in how they managed their time, but they were adamant that extensions didn’t match their sense of self. So third thing, third dimension of academic integration, which is social integration.

So the interviews progressed in an interesting fashion, and one of the things that we did was that we went into this saying to students, well we want to find ways of supporting you better, so what’s your wish list, what would you like to be better supported? So students gave us this wish list which they wanted a dedicated carers’ support line and a dedicated carers’ worker they could phone if they had trouble. They wanted the tutors to ring them proactively when they could see they were carers. They wanted a support group. They wanted a special website about information for carers. They wanted their own discussion forum. They wanted mentoring. So several of these items are about carers saying to us, we want better social support.

So that was one part of the interview. When we talked to carers about how they liked to manage their study, the results were actually quite different, 75% of our students, three out of four described themselves in terms that we called solo students. They didn’t engage with their peers. They didn’t lean on their tutor for pastoral support. They worked things by themselves. They didn’t go to forums. They didn’t draw from our mentoring programmes. They simply wanted to study by themselves, taking advantage of distance learning. And this is completely understandable. Distance learning is flexible, until you throw other people in the mix, and then you need to start coordinating your schedules with other people that limits their flexibility.

The biggest reason for being solo students is this, and it’s a quote that comes from the first person, and it is that their social capital isn’t institutionally based. They’re not actually interesting in building institutional social capital, they have friends and family who give them support, and this is what sustained them. They don’t want an online community; they’ve got a community that supports them. On the other hand 25% of our participants were connected to students. So these were students who did have friends who are other students and they talk to them and they found them supportive, but the thing is they don’t like our formal measures. They didn’t use forums. They like WhatsApp, they like Facebook, because these things fit into their lives. If you’re the student in the gaps things that works best in your life is having WhatsApp on your phone or being able to use Facebook Messenger on your phone. So they found the cradle of their own support, their own social capital within the university, but it wasn’t our predefined community.

So, a couple of conclusions then about belonging, so looking at the data on motivations and career, that the sense of belonging is multi-faceted, it could be vocational, in this case that was a minority of students. In some cases belonging is personally reinforcing that studying material that’s relevant to my role as a carer, but for the most part belonging is expansive. It’s about transcending who I am and becoming something different.

In terms of academic integration, we can foster belonging through academic integration. But students don’t want accommodations that are made on request. At least a significant proportion didn’t want that. They want accommodations that are intrinsic. That is courses that give them a chance of starting early, getting the reading done early, catch-up weeks built into the courses, choices of tutorial times and removing sudden death assignments like examinations where it all hinges on an inflexible date. The third component of belonging is social capital. And for students the social capital wasn’t institutional in the sense of they either drew on networks from outside the institution or they used none institutional methods to build social capital without the students, so.

Finally I just want to leave the last word with our students. This student pretty much sums up a key message that our students don’t want us to lower standards for them. And in some ways they don’t necessarily want to yeah make it excessively easy for them. They want to get through this and they want to do the best that they can. So thank you everyone. I’m Chris Kubiak. Please get in touch if you want to carry on the conversation. I’d love to hear from you. OK, thank you.

Liz Hardie: Bring up my screen. Can you all see that OK? I can see that, yeah thank you, great. So, lovely to be here, thank you for the invite. I’m Liz Hardy and I’m Teaching Director in Law. So I am here to talk about some work we’re doing in the Law School. We are very much at the first stage of this work and this research into this area. So it’s a lot more tentative than the presentation Chris has just done. I’m really just here to share our initial thoughts and plans around this, around developing online academic student communities.

So the first thing to admit is that my interest in belonging really came about by accident, and it was as a result of some work I was involved in around student wellbeing. So in the UK it’s fairly well established that law students are at greater risk of poor mental health and wellbeing than other students. And so we’ve been doing some work around wellbeing, specifically a project, a wellbeing project and a peer mentoring project, looking at what support we could provide our students with. And during those projects we became aware that student feedback was really emphasising the importance of them feeling part of an academic community in order to improve their student wellbeing and their mental health.

So, as a result, myself and a few colleagues started to look into a little bit more detail around this, and the theories of wellbeing and how that linked really to theories around a sense of belonging to an academic community. And I’ve just put there some of the articles and studies we looked at. Studies finding that students who felt a greater sense of belonging to their institution had a lower level of stress, anxiety and depression - that was Skead & Rogers. But it can help students address feelings of isolation, marginalisation, loneliness, alienation, and of course all of those can be an issue in an online distance learning environment. And there were also studies relating to improve student attainment and increase student satisfaction. But when we looked at this, most of these studies related primarily to campus based face-to-face institutions. And the studies that do look at it in an online distance learning environment really emphasise that whilst a sense of belonging is important online it’s quite difficult to establish.

So we started to think about how could we look at establishing a greater sense of belonging to the Law School from our students in that online distance learning environment? So the definition we’ve been working with in terms of a sense of belonging is this one here from Thomas, who’s done some work around this in an online environment, and he talks about being accepted and valued and encouraged by others. And for us an important thing is the involvement of academic staff as well as peers, unlike our peer mentoring project which is very much around peer support, and the fact that each individual is important and valued and respected as that independent learner. So we’ve been looking at how we could incorporate this within our Law School. And before I go on to explain what we’ve been doing I just want to relate it briefly to some of the previous work we’ve done, because this very much is a piece of work, a project that has developed out of other projects, it’s not standalone, and it’s building upon work that we’ve done previously and evaluations that we’ve done previously. So these are just some of the projects that preceded this, that’s brought us to this point.

So, as I mentioned earlier, we had been doing some work around improving student wellbeing and reducing isolation, really around fostering communities of practice amongst students. So we had a peer mentoring project that you can see on the bottom left-hand side which was around establishing peer support for students, where more experienced students helped our first year students, and we were trying to encourage self-help study groups amongst those students. And then we’ve also run a series of projects for specific cohorts of students. So over the last couple of years we’ve had projects providing support to our full-time intensity students, that’s the top left, and the top right for our younger students, which we defined as 18 to 21 year-olds within the Open University context. And also linking really to what Chris has been talking about a little bit, I haven’t put it on the screen, we have looked at students who are carers, but we’ve also, the one I’ve picked on the screen is our care experience students. And for various reasons all of these cohorts of students can be seen as being at a greater risk of failing to complete their studies. So we offered them additional support from academic staff and an opportunity to interact with their peers. And these were all projects that ran during 2020/2021 and offered that support through a mixture of asynchronous forums and synchronous online events.

So, we evaluated all of these projects, and that was done through a mixture of student interviews, student focus groups and surveys, and I’ve just included a quote from a variety of various evaluations here. But what we did pick up across kind of looking at it as a whole was that student feedback about these projects were remarkably similar. So students really, as Chris has already mentioned, did not like or take up the support that was offered through the online forums. And you can see there some of the quotes around them not feeling comfortable putting things on forum because they know that staff are looking at them, and not wanting to sound silly or to ask silly questions. And one of the things that really came through around that is around the fact that they saw these forums as being formal moderated spaces; what they were wanting they were telling us was informal spaces where they could get that peer support and peer interaction. And there was a lot of comments as you might expect around comparing forums with social media, with forums being seen as formal and social media being seen as informal.

But the other thing that we were surprised about was how positive the students were about the online synchronous sessions. So these were a variety of sessions where they met online, sometimes with each other, student-led events, sometimes with members of staff being present, and the students really valued those opportunities, particularly where they had the opportunity to meet both staff and students across the qualification. So it wasn’t limited to a particular module like it would be with a tutorial, but that they met people across modules and across levels of study.

So, as a result of this, and we started thinking about whether it was possible to encourage those more informal opportunities for students to interact with fellow students who were at a different point in their academic career and also opportunities to interact with members, academic members of the Law School and whether that would help to encourage this greater sense of belonging to the Law School. So, you might be surprised by seeing this slide, which is a prehistorical burial mound, particularly as I’m a law academic talking about work we’ve done with our law students. But I included this, because really one of the challenges we’ve been thinking about is how do you establish that sense of belonging in an online environment and how do you establish those informal spaces online, because a sense of belonging is often related to the physical environment.

So this is a lecture I went to with my daughter recently by Professor Alice Roberts, who’s an archaeologist, who was talking about how the prehistoric burial mounds and the long barrows were signs of prehistoric people trying to establish their sense of belonging within their landscape. So, thinking about it within in an academic context, often attending the lecture theatre, being in the Law School building, having those opportunities for formal and informal face-to-face conversations, all are important in building that sense of belonging. But we know that online those kinds of opportunities don’t occur naturally, and if we’re going to try and encourage those informal opportunities in particular we have to nurture them and provide opportunities for that to happen.

So I’m really thinking about the difference between these formal and informal spaces and how those relate to a sense of belonging and how they could develop a sense of belonging to an academic community. So how can we replicate that going for a coffee after a lecture with fellow students and having that conversation online when students actually feel it’s quite high stakes and threatening to be asked particularly to communicate in forums online, that leaves a permanent record of what they’re saying which can be read by other students and by staff. And we know and that was the outcome of our evaluation is that students are really reluctant as a result to use forums and were quite negative about them.

So that’s kind of the background to our thinking and why this project was established and, as I say, it’s only been set up this academic year. We’re at the early stage of it, but we have run this belonging project which is a pilot to see whether we can encourage a better sense of belonging amongst our students. And we’re trying to replicate those opportunities for formal and informal interactions between both staff and students. So I’m going share where we’re up to. We are planning an evaluation, but because we’re at such an early stage we haven’t yet got to that point.

So we set out and coordinated a programme of online activities for our law students that have run between December ’21 and will finish in July of this year, which is a variety of opportunities for students to interact online with fellow students across the qualification and with our members of staff. So, and you can see on the slide the events that have been planned, some of which have taken place. We have had 10 guest lecturers, which are given by academics on various aspects of law and legal skills, and there’s just a couple of examples there. I think one of the people who are here today is going to be giving the lecture on the end of divorce law, so it’s great to see Andrew here. We’ve also run six employability workshops, which are looking at both legal and non-legal careers, and then we’ve got six student-led coffee events, where students have volunteered to meet online for a chat with fellow students, and they’re typically focused on students from a particular background.

So, you can see some of the examples here, and we’ve also got other examples of events for veterans for example or for people studying with other disabilities. And those events were volunteered by the students and suggested by the students. We’ve deliberately not set up a forum because of the feedback that we’ve had previously around our forums, but we do have the general law forum on our law subject site, where we are trying to encourage people who want to continue those conversations to post on that forum, and we’re in the process of setting up a blog on our Law School website, which both academics and students will be invited to submit very short blogs to, and that hopefully will be launched in the next month.

So that’s the plan for the programme of events that we’re doing. And in terms of the impact to date, so far we’ve run six guest lectures, six employability events and two of the student-led coffee events. So, looking at the guest lectures, we limit attendance to 200 students to register, and we’re almost always booked out for those events, and around half of the students that register do attend, so we’ve had about 100 students attend each event. And those events are recorded and you can see a copy of the recording page screenshot on the side. And usually you can see there’s around 50-70 students watch each event. But you can see that the most recent event we ran, which was actually on a legal skills issue, how to answer a legal problem question, we’ve had over 1,000 viewings of that recording since it went out on 20th April. So there certainly seems to be from the students an appetite in terms of attending and listening to the recordings of these events.

The coffee events are not recorded, because the idea is that the students will have an opportunity to talk informally together. We limit registration to 75 students, and usually again they’re booked out and around 40 or so have registered to attend, sorry about 40 have registered to attend so far around 20, 10, 20 students have actually attended. So they seem to be a much slower take-up of students for those. The employability events, we don’t yet really have a huge amount of information about those, because they’re run on a different platform through our career service, so we’re still waiting for the information around those to filter through to us, hopefully that will come soon.

So, there are plans to evaluate the impact of the project, and we are hoping to look at the numbers attending the events, how popular they were, and we’re thinking about whether we can look at whether there’s any correlation between participating in the project and attainment, but there’s huge issues over that, so that’s a little bit uncertain at the moment. But we are planning to run some focus groups and interviews in June for students who attended. And we’re thinking in the longer term around possibly looking at a wider student survey to gauge students’ views around this and possibly using the [Manse? 0:32:33] York survey about belonging which has been run in other institutions.

So, as I say, this is the start of a much bigger project, but the questions we’re really starting to think about are these: what does belonging to an academic community look like online; how do we encourage that sense of belonging when we’re in an online distance learning context; and particularly for this year, what impact does qualification-wide events have on that; and why does it matter, what is the impact of that sense of belonging?

So that’s where we’re at the moment. I do apologise that it’s much more tentative and it’s at its very early stages, but I’m glad to be able to share it with you the work that we’ve been doing, and we would welcome any thoughts or insights you have around this to help shape the future project and the research and evaluation we’re doing. So thank you very much. Thank you.

Sue Pawley: Yes, as Claire has just said, I’m Sue Pawley. I’m a Scholarship Lead for Maths and Stats, and I’m here with Cath Brown, who’s one of our associate lecturers, and she’s an associate lecturer for a wide variety of course, so I think whilst she would say that she does concentrate on Maths and Stats, she is actually an associate lecturer on many courses throughout the STEM faculty and so she has a finger in very many pies which is quite nice. And yeah and, as Claire said, we’re looking at creating a community with students re social activities.

Thinking about the previous two presentations, we’re kind of probably about halfway between the two. We’re quite a long way through our first year and a bit of dabbling, shall we say. The first year was very definitely a dabble; whereas this second year from September/October-time this year, we’ve been doing it properly. Through our scholarship centre we’ve actually been thinking about the context and why we’re doing it and how we are creating this community of students through social activities.

So, at the moment, we’re concentrating purely on one module. So, want to move on, Cath, I think I’ll guess that you’ll be able to judge when we need to move on rather than actually saying anything, so hopefully we’ll be there. Right and what we’re looking at is we’re looking at a module, which is MST124, which is a first level maths module, OK. And what we find with this module is actually it’s a really big [unclear 0:35:09] module, so it teaches students throughout STEM and also from all the faculties in the university. If you look at our nice little pie chart being a mathematician, so quite nice there, and what you can see is that the blue colours are those that are either a maths degree itself, so it’s our maths and stats degree, or our maths and mixed learning degrees, or those that are joint honours, so there are maths and physics or a maths and economics. So that’s a very, only about a third of the proportion of students are actually doing and actual ooh I like maths, we’re only doing a maths degree, OK, and the rest of the students are those that have maths built into their degree because they require it or they simply just like to study it for a while. So we will see how, so that’s the students on the module, sorry I’m being distracted by something that Cath’s just written that says her internet is playing up. So we’ll keep all our fingers crossed that it still carries on working.

So what we find with this module is that actually for many of them, for about 38% of the students, is actually they’re classified as being new students. So that might not mean that MST124 is their first module, but it’s certainly a module they’ll be doing within their first year. And so they’re still very new to the university. Equally, many of the students don’t have relevant level 3 qualifications. So they haven’t got an A-level of maths equivalent or something. So a lot of the study at this level is something incredibly new to them. And so a lot of students can find it quite disconcerting, it’s a study at high level. And so the things that we can do to actually help support the students are really useful. And ultimately as we’ve said many times before, with the Open University being a distance learning university and with the additional impact of COVID over the last few years and having absolutely no face-to-face opportunities, actually forming these communities and actually students recognising each other just gets harder and hard nowadays.

So what are we doing in this project of ours? So what we’re doing is we’re simply aiming to create a community among students, and we’re doing this in a purely social context. We’ve got lots of tutorials and as we’ve talked about forums and things like that that we have. Oh sorry have I missed a slide? Oh yeah I will stop talking and I will let Cath talk, I’ve turned over two pages at once I do apologise.

Cath Brown: That’s all right. So, we want to, just wanted to find out what we’re trying to achieve here. So, in a broader sense, a high level thing, we’re looking at improving retention satisfaction and success on the module. Now, what we’re doing here isn’t going to do that on its own; it’s what I might call a starting point for that. So, just to mention a little bit about the lack of community to begin with, one of the things we found is that NSS data on academic community in maths and stats doesn’t look as good as our STEM faculty as a whole, so that’s something we obviously want to address. And student behaviours on social media, there’s quite a lot of groups for students on particular modules, students doing maths, students doing particular qualifications and so on, show that people, our students are actually wanting community; they’re not just doing distance learning because they’re not fussed about it.

So that’s a good thing in itself. But we’ve also got the side benefit of the impact of a better community on the student experience as a whole and just to say a little bit more about that. I think we probably all know that the idea of having some degree of academic resilience, managing to keep going when things are tough and a growth mindset, the idea that you can actually develop your skills, that you’re not set in advance, are important for success. And community does promote these. We had a look at the literature on that so it wasn’t just our own instinctive feeling about that. And so if we can develop that community, it can help us improve both retention and attainment as well as community being a good thing in itself, and we’ve actually built on some work that’s been run elsewhere in the university.

So, our open programme students, the team administering that were developing some events specifically for that community during the pandemic. Our design innovation colleagues have been working on co-curricular visits, obviously that’s educational in itself but also again getting those students to connect with each other. And the online journal club that our life science colleagues have run, we were again getting students in a different environment doing something that’s not assessed where they can work together. So the sorts of things we’re doing are building on some of these things that our colleagues have done. So, back to Sue now.

Sue Pawley: I’ll get on the right sheet this time. So what are we doing? Right, so we’re trying to create that sense of community from our students but without that formal nature that we struggle with, tutorials and tutor things. So we’re trying to give them something to do that’s going to get them to chat to each other, to working groups, to have any reason to get together which isn’t an academic reason. So it’s not, with maths a lot of people have that certain amount of anxiety that says oh I don’t want to speak in a maths tutorial because I might say something really stupid. Or I might say something that’s wrong or lots of things like that. We have a lot of issues with students that just don’t want to venture an opinion. So if we can give them something that they can attend where they can just talk and just be normal and not feel like it’s a quiz or a test or something then that would be good; although ironically we tend to run a lot of quizzes. So it’s not a maths test, how about that, but just giving them something social to attend.

So we are running programmes, events. We’re running quizzes. We’ve done some things like, we’ve had some interactive games as well that we’ve done online as well, and then what we’re going to do in a couple of months is we’re going to run some student focus groups, which we’re going to talk to the students about what they might like to do online. We’re thinking about various other things such as, I don’t know, origami and Celtic knots and Islamic art and things like that. But it’s all just to give students that peer support, that connection with another student on the course and give them someone to connect with when times get hard really. So right over to Cath again.

Cath Brown: So this is what we’re planning to evaluate it. So we’re not just going to run a few nice events and then say hey we’ve done it. So, questionnaires, and we’ve set out our first set of questionnaires last week and we do have a few responses that we’ll be talking about in a few minutes. We’ll also have a look at the students who attended, numbers, whether they’re staying in the event once they come, obviously they’ll vote with their feet if they’re not enjoying it, you can easily do that on a remote event, and looking at the profile of students who attended. As obviously that’s pretty important if we’re trying to reach the broader community that we’re not just getting students who are already perhaps contributing on course forums and so on.

So, what are we doing so far? Well, for the October starters, we’ve done three events, and we’ve done two for the February starters. One of those has been joint so far and that was last Sunday evening. They all seemed to have a rather nice time. We’re planning on four in total for each cohort spread through the year. We’re going to have one that’s a kind of post-exam wind-down in particular as we think everyone needs to de-stress and it’s better to de-stress with other people who’ve been through the same experience. And we will also do one at the beginning of the module to try and encourage them into it, get to know people early on and then others reasonably spaced, so for example doing a Christmas event for the October starters.

We’ve had numbers typically between 20 and 50 students. That’s not a huge proportion of our cohort, but we still think that’s useful. And as we develop it there will be more word of mouth getting more students in in addition to the communications we’re doing ourselves about it. And we’re trying different days of the week. Obviously OU students are typically busy people, 76% of them are in work, people also have kids and so on, so there’s not one optimum time.

So we’re doing a bit of experimentation about that to figure out what works the best there. And the software our students use for their tutorials, Adobe Connect, is something that obviously they’re already familiar with, but it has perhaps a bit of a formal feel, so we’re also looking at using Zoom, which we think they will associate with leisure activities, connecting to people socially and so on. So we’re doing a bit of mix and match, and that’s one of the things we’ll be talking to our focus groups about, about how they feel about the different formats. Obviously we can’t entirely compare those in isolation because there were too many other factors to judge which is more popular. And now back to Sue to talk about the numbers.

Sue Pawley Oh right. So, as Cath said, we’ve actually got a survey open at the moment. It’s been open only a week so far and these are data taken from just the start of the week. So it’s only data taken from 28 students. So bearing in mind these are the very initial findings of our survey and we’re hoping that a few more students will respond to the survey before we close it at the end of the month. So, as long with it only being a small number of students that have answered so far, because we think that some of the proportions of feedback from students might change, we’re only actually looking at a couple of the questions that we’ve asked. So it’s a small amount of our survey done by a small amount of the participants at the moment. So there’s not a huge amount we can read into these findings so far, but I think some of it is probably not going to change that much over the additional number of students that are filling it in.

So the surveys we’ve used tended to mainly use the lookup scale. So we’ve got students. We’ve asked them questions. We’ve asked them do they strongly disagree, strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree or disagree or strongly agree to them. So we’ve got these five ranges of answers which for purposes of reporting in the tables I’ve just condensed down to either agree, disagree or they’re not really bothered. And so we’re looking at two questions really that I thought was very interesting to start with. And that’s for our students how important do they feel to be part of the following communities? And so the idea being, do you think it’s important to be a community of the module you’re studying at the moment, or students that are on your same degree pathway, so the maths and stats students, maybe, or how about students in the same faculty?

So we’re in the faculty of STEM, which is Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics - I struggled to work out what the M was just then, that’s rather embarrassing isn’t it? - and/or whether we thought they wanted to be part of the community of the OU students, or maybe those with similar characteristics or interests, maybe they might want to join up with everyone that’s got a cat or something or likes knitting or is an older student or a young student or a carer, and then equally whether they actually felt they wanted to be connected to just students in general, students as a whole in the higher education. And one of the interesting things we’ve found I think which is really interesting is that at the Open University, and I think this is probably different for different universities, but because we’re a distance learning part-time university, so all the students were studying at different rates, so actually to keep hold of students within your degree pathway might be difficult, students felt it was really quite important that they want to be in the community of the students that are on that module at the time. And I think it reflects where that student is on their learning journey at that point.

And so it’s really, that’s where they want to form those community is within the students on that course, and also to a certain extent the students that are on your same degree, so ones that will be travelling through that same pathway. Whereas as you extend out those groups of those [unclear 0:48:09] communities they’re really not quite so fussed. I think that might be different for the Open University and different for any organisation than it is for a face-to-face university. It’d be quite interesting to compare those feelings about how important those communities are, because a face-to-face university I think maybe they might feel they want to be more part of that university culture as well; whereas we’re very definitely a module and a degree and everything else seems a lot more distant.

So it’s quite nice that we’ve got students who actually feel they want to be part of the community. I think unfortunately at the point we are at the moment is although they feel they want to be. Unfortunately there are responses coming in from how much of that community do they actually feel they’re in? The answer is yeah unfortunately we’re not there yet and what we’re doing isn’t creating those communities for them. So I think these focus groups that we’re going to run is going to be really important and seeing what they want to do.

So along with the survey we did have some free text responses on some very small things. The first question we fed was we asked them to give any details of anything they thought had helped them to become part of the community of the module that we’re looking at in particular. One of the nice things that was interesting to see was, we’ve ordered them in order, so the first one is the one that students have mentioned the most in the survey, and so quite nicely they have ranked our tutorials and our tutor groups and things like that as being the things that’s created that sense of community the most. And that’s been our very traditional, that’s how we’ve created a sense of community for our students in the past. We’ve put them into a tutor group of 20 students with a tutor and that tutor has had contact with those students.

Quite nicely for us our quizzes have come up most after that. And then equally it mentioned after that has been the forums and the social media, and the social media being those connections that the students form outside of the university connection. We were talking about that a little bit during Liz’s talk, I think, or at the end of Liz’s talk about those forms and social media. And the other thing we said, what could be done to help you feel more part of that community? And actually I think the really first quote is actually the really interesting one that said we had a student that really wanted to be part of the community and she joined the WhatsApp groups and the Facebook groups and the discord groups and then found that, yeah discord, now I had to ask my teenage son what discord was. But she found that it was just too overwhelming and that the volume that was there was actually just too much noise for her and so she had to step back from those.

And so I think as a second student suggested that maybe if we can get away from the formalisation of these forums and I think things like the students bodies that we were talking about earlier as well might help, maybe some form of forum on our OU servers, but specifically for off-topic chats. We have quite a nice one that we associate with our quizzes and our social group that is just a social chat and students post a lot of, as you’re probably aware there’s an awful lot of maths memes out there, and students quite enjoy posting the maths memes, and they find that amusing and commenting on each other’s. So that’s one of the things that we do, tend to do a lot.

But I think probably the key point is the bottom one that says students find it really difficult to get part of a community because it’s remote. And actually as our quiz shows and as the research that Chris was doing earlier showed as well from the carers, a lot of our students don’t actually want to be part of a community, they’re quite happy doing, I’m doing it on my own, I’m doing it through the OU because that’s my own way of doing it. And we need to be very mindful of those students as well. We want to create this community, but only for those students that want the community. We’ve got to be mindful that we’re not trying to ram something down the face of the students that actually want to do it on their own and they’ve got the community they want. And they don’t need or want us and we don’t want to disassociate those students by putting them off because we’re always trying to force them to be sociable really.

So that’s where we’ve got and that’s where we are at the moment. So what are we doing next? So next is these focus groups that we’re going to run, and so this is a chance we’re going to get to really find out what the students want and what they think will work with becoming parts of the community, and so that will help us to feed forward to next year and onwards. I think next year we’ll certainly be looking at having that, we’ve looked at a very module-based community at the moment, and I think that it’s definitely worth looking at extensions to maybe trying to link students from other modules and getting that economies of scale going. So I think 20 to 50 students is all right for a social event, and we’ve been doing pub quiz style things and that works, but equally it can work with more students. So I think we’re going to look at that but on a bigger scale. And maybe we’ve got, we have study sites for our degrees where it’s a module website which holds all the information on the maths and stats degrees, and we direct students to that a lot. So hopefully all of our students are familiar with that. So we’re thinking maybe connecting up onto the study site and gaining that economies of scale through there.

So that’s kind of where we are at the moment and yeah we’re here really to find any suggestions of anything that anyone else has done and just it’s been a really lovely afternoon. You’ve missed a lot, Cath, it’s been really good, it has, and just the ideas of trying to create those social communities and getting our students together to talk to each other has been really interesting. Our next page covers all the references we’ve got for anyone that’s interested in that. I will let Cath linger over that one and thanks for listening.

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