Seeds for Solutions: Innovation Projects from 2016/17
Project Title: Video Resource Pack: Developing Academic Communication Skills for International Students
Project Leader(s): Ella Tennant
The need to adapt to Keele’s academic culture is one of many challenges faced by international students. This project will focus on the design, production and publication of a video resource pack aimed at helping students develop the communication skills necessary to succeed in their degree programmes. The resource pack composed of short video films and an accompanying handbook will serve as a learning tool embedded in the KLE, concentrating on three areas: giving presentations, participating in tutorial/seminar discussions and communicating with a personal tutor, within the Keele academic context.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Project Title: The Lecture as Performative Pantomime: (Back)channelling student conversations to maximise engagement and collaborative learning in lectures
Project Leader(s): Angela Rhead and Matthew Brannan
This project will explore the use of TodaysMeet to create temporary chatrooms unique to each lecture, which employs students’ personal electronic devices (smartphones / tablets / laptops) to stimulate and capture individual / small group dialogues. These dialogues create a feedback loop between lecturer and audience to facilitate a collectively produced learning event.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Project Title: Supporting the international student transition: The English-Mandarin 'talking glossary' for Environmental students
Project Leader(s): Katie Szkornik
Students from China coming to study in the UK face significant language and cultural barriers. Studies show that despite extensive support, English Language problems remain a major barrier to achievement within assessment from China (Mathias et al., 2013; Szkornik et al., 2015). This study develops a subject-specific, English-Mandarin 'talking glossary', which will be used as a learning tool in modules currently delivered in China by Keele-based academics (flying faculty; Smith, 2014), as part of our collaborative degree programme in Environment and Sustainability with Nanjing Xiaozhuang University.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
