DAPL4 M Online. What went wrong and why, learning from our mistakes.
Angela Rhead, Student Learning; Katy Lockett SSDS and Matthew Street, Student Learning / LPDC
Summary
Student Learning launched the Developing Academic Practice at Level 5 (DAPL5) pilot in 2015/16. An intensive, seven-week open course in both semesters, DAPL5 supports Level 5 students to explore academic reading, thinking and writing practices in the context of their modules. Based on DAPL5’s success, and in partnership with SSDS’s mature student liaison officer, we piloted the DAPL4Mature (DAPL4M) course in October 2016 to re-engage mature students with learning confidently and increase awareness of the services available. A shorter, four-week course, DAPL4M focused on the preliminary aspects of scholarly study: making the most of handbooks; note-taking in seminars / lectures; managing reading lists. With a small number of the students who applied actually able to attend the Wednesday morning workshops (6/26), we launched DAPL4M as a closed online course in semester two. We envisaged an online course, ‘attended’ at any time in the week but with a weekly ‘delivery schedule’ of content, discussion and online chat (see Table 1), would increase participation, perhaps also capturing students who had applied in semester one. We also hoped to engage with a wider range of students not attracted to the face-to-face, communal workshop approach. To reflect the learning journey, we added a session on using feedback, experiences and work from semester one to shape development in semester two.
Ultimately, we attracted fewer students: thirteen applied, three of whom had applied to the first DAPL4M. Nine of those thirteen engaged in the pre-course ‘Getting to Know Each Other’ KLE discussion forum; two engaged partially in the Session 1 blog discussions on ‘Being Academic’; by Session 2, no one was participating. Additionally, no one attended any of the ‘Live Chat’ discussions, intended to explore questions created by the week’s tasks. After a silent ‘Live Chat’ session in week three of the course, we reluctantly decided to close DAPL4M Online, providing details about the Write Direction 1:1 academic coaching service should anyone want to continue to focus on their academic development.
Having closed DAPL4M Online prematurely, we wanted to reflect and explore insights gained from piloting an ostensibly ‘failed’ initiative. We assessed it (entirely subjectively) at a grade of 35% in terms of success, and then shared our thoughts on two questions:
1. Why did we not judge it less than 35%?
2. Why did we not judge it more than 35%?
We then considered how to apply our ideas to future projects or to our wider practices. Find out more here
Developing Academic Practice at Level 4 Mature (DAPL4M) Online by Angela Rhead, Katy Lockett, Matthew Street is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://lpdcsolutions.blogspot.com/2017/11/developing-academic-practice-at-level-4.html.
