How to communicate with your student cohort out of class time.

Guess you know you can issue Announcements and Emails through your NILE module directly to your students, but ever thought about using student-led communication tools like Discussion Boards, to continue communication and debate, and get feedback from your students outside of class time?

You might also know that by creating groups of students in your module, you can allocate them their own discussion boards, blogs and wikis to work on collaboratively. But don’t forget you can also use these for peer support, and for delivering group feedback. Imagine how it would improve communication and feedback within the module cohort.

Finally, you can personalise the student learning experience by creating private journals for students to post their thoughts, feedback and experiences. Only you can see their entries and reply to them if you wish. You can even use this to create a confidential ‘backchannel’ in the lecture theatre – if students are unsure on any of the points you’ve made, they can raise a question from their laptop or smartphone without identifying themselves to the rest of the cohort.

Have a look at these video tutorials and User Guides to look into these aspects more.

Many subjects in the School of Social Sciences are creating Welcome sites on NILE. They aim to provide information and ongoing help to prospective students considering studying at the University and to support new students in their first year of studies when they arrive.

Faith Tucker (SL- Geography) has provided some feedback from the Geography Welcome site which was made available to guests on NILE earlier this year.

Faith explains in her evaluation document the types of content they provided and which areas were accessed most by students. The most popular areas were “Study with us”; “Assignments”; “Teaching Staff”; “FAQs” and “Useful links”.

In total there were 1131 hits in September 2011 – most occurring between 14th and 20th September. This demonstrates how prospective students utilised the site to supplement their ongoing awareness of the Geography courses.

Direct Student feedback on the most useful areas include::
“the Welcome Week timetable and also getting acquainted with Blackboard before the start of the course”
“timetable, teaching staff, course/module information”
“the module information so I knew what to expect, and the tutors so I knew who was who”

The Geography department will continue to update and use the welcome module and are considering providing a link to the site to those attending Applicant Visit Days in the early part of 2011-12 to evaluate the level of success for students pre-entry.

This case study looks at how the School of Social Sciences Criminology Division used Hand Held Voting Units with a quiz to help improve interaction and engagement with students in the course Welcome Week activities.

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