Tag Archives: international students

The student experience on an online Pre-sessional Course for international students

10/06/2016

Boarding Pass and Prepare for Pre-sessionalThis month’s blogpost is by Julie Watson, Head of eLearning in the Department of Modern Languages:

Since 2010, eLanguages have developed two five-week online courses, both focusing on English language development for international students who particularly need to improve their academic writing and reading skills in preparation for further study on a face-to-face summer Pre-sessional Programme. These courses are aimed at students who have obtained a lower IELTS score of 5.0 or 5.5 in reading and/or writing and they cover basic concepts and preparatory skills for academic writing; reading and critical thinking; vocabulary and grammar and developing students’ study skills awareness. A process approach is adopted towards writing development and each week there is a related reading or writing assignment as well as a grammar and vocabulary self-test.

Currently there are two versions of the five week online course. The first is Pre-sessional Boarding Pass, which is designed for students preparing for MSc or MBA study in the Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. It forms the first component of a 16-week Pre-sessional Course in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Globally-dispersed students on this intensive, discipline-specific course are tutored by EAP specialists based in the UK. Over 300 students have completed the course before proceeding onto their face-to-face pre-sessional since it was launched in 2011.

In 2014, a generic version of the course, called Prepare for Pre-sessional, was developed for students of mixed disciplines. The course was successfully piloted at the University of Southampton in the summer of 2014 and is already being licenced by another institution whose tutors teach their own cohorts of international students in a bespoke part of the course platform.

Student feedback on introduced technologies

The student experience on the course is an area of particular research interest and their end-of-course feedback has helped to shape the course and led to innovations in technology choices to facilitate the effective delivery of the course. Student requests for more audio-visual media to support student-tutor communication has led to the addition of voice-chat and videoed tutor feedback on course progression, approach to assignments etc, to supplement the forum and text-chat tools. Students found these beneficial in a number of ways as this small sample of forum posts shows:
• The voice chat room is useful for me because I can talk and learn to connect with the tutor and everyone. I can discuss problems in studying and receive solutions. That is excellent…
• The video helps me a lot. Now I know how to conduct my writing. Thank you for advice.
• Thanks for your advice for our writing assignment, according to this video I understand the structure in each paragraph. And I will submit it on time.
• Thank you for this video. It is very useful to me. I will attempt to complete every activities in this course.
• Thank you for your video, it helped me to obtain important information of online course. I watched the video and understood. It is also a way to improve our listening. Thanks a lot.
• Thank you for your video. I am going be more active and make more contributions.

Tutor views on benefits to students

Another area in which we are trying to gather more data is the potential of the online course for acculturating students into UK academic practice before they progress to a face-to-face Pre-sessional Programme. With this in mind, class tutors on the main Pre-sessional Programme at the University of Southampton, who receive students from the online courses, have been interviewed about their progress and there is tentative evidence that such students are more confident and perform better from the start:
• “What is mostly apparent is that X quickly recognises what I am teaching, she tends to grasp the point before the other students. In these situations it is apparent that she has prior knowledge of the topics I introduce to the class.”
• “She’s the best in the class, pure and simple…right from the beginning the very first writing task they do on the first day she had proper structure, her paragraphs were organised and had some logic.”

Institutional licensing

We hope collaboration with institutions currently licensing the online course will yield more useful data for our course evaluation. More information about pre-sessional online courses, Pre-sessional Boarding Pass and Prepare for Pre-sessional is available on the eLanguages website.

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S4B: A new Blended Learning module for students of Business

25/01/2016

S4B: Academic and Professional Skills for Business

This month’s blogpost is by Sarah Winspear, Senior Teaching Fellow and Assistant Director of the Pre-Sessional Programmes for international students in Modern Languages:

The Southampton Business School (SBS) has over 1,100 postgraduate taught students, and developing their academic and professional skills is essential to help students prepare for success in both their studies and future employment.

The large size of this cohort means that a new approach is needed for effective delivery of these skills alongside taught Business modules. A blended learning solution has been developed by the English Language Section in the Centre for Language Study in collaboration with SBS. The new blended learning module ‘Academic and Professional Skills for Business’ (S4B) combines face-to-face and online (Blackboard) delivery and includes self-study activities, videos and interactive presentations built using Articulate Storyline.

Students can choose, and mix and match from:
1. Online learning activities (available at any time)
2. Face-to-face workshops and lectures (places booked in advance online)
3. Face-to-face tutorials (booked in advance online)
4. Practice assignments (graded and with feedback).

2015-2016 is a pilot year during which the module is offered as an option. Initial feedback from students has been very positive, and module evaluation so far is as follows:

1. Online learning activities
These will be relaunched for future deliveries to reflect clearer pathways for students; resource delivery will be time-released to map with student needs (e.g. academic writing in September and exam preparation in December).

2. Face-to-face workshops and lectures
Advance online booking appears to ‘add value’ and encourage participation; session timetabling will be extended to the early evening to meet all students’ needs; further content development is needed to suit home students and the two types of international students with different skill awareness levels (post pre-sessional and direct entry).

3. Face-to-face tutorials
These will be offered as early evening or early morning slots in future to ensure all students have the opportunity to attend; an online booking system is still in development.

4. Practice assignments
Evidence from students who undertook these short assignment tasks and received feedback clearly suggests they benefit considerably; promotion of the benefits is needed to increase student take-up of this part of the module package.

Finally, a fuller evaluation is planned during S4B delivery in semester 2 with the aim of improving the module and providing students with the skills needed to succeed in their studies and in their future employment.

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‘SmartSkills’ and ‘Protonomy’: scaffolding the start of a transition to learner autonomy in a blended learning environment by encouraging Independent Learning and pro-active autonomy

13/11/2015

University of Southampton SmartSkillsThis month’s blogpost is from Vanessa Mar-Molinero, Senior Teaching Fellow / Independent Learning Co-ordinator, and Chris Lewis, Teaching Fellow / Independent Learning Deputy Coordinator, in the Department of Modern Languages:

The importance of the role of independent learning with its emphasis on student-centredness has been recognised as an integral part of higher education programmes. However, many students, both home and international, struggle with the transition to learner autonomy. In Modern Languages at the University of Southampton, we have developed a range of scaffolded courses with compulsory and non-compulsory elements designed to support this transition and equip different cohorts of students with skills, strategies, techniques and tools, or ‘SmartSkills’, that are vital for success in not only their language learning, but also for their academic achievement and professional skills. The courses are scaffolded through a blended / flipped learning environment whereby students use vidcasts, podcasts and interactive quizzes to achieve learning objectives before attending workshops with an Independent Learning Facilitator.

Our research focuses on data collected from a case study of the pedagogical development of ‘SmartSkills’ Independent Learning blended learning modules for international students. The approach is largely a qualitative one, supported with some quantitative data. We aim to show how the conceptual framework of scaffolding transition to more autonomous learning using different methods, including digital literacies, contributes to the transition for international students into a learning environment emphasising development of learner autonomy in a UK university.

We explore the concepts of autonomy, defined by Race (2002) as a process in which a student is equipped with the tools, techniques and strategies which over time empower an individual to learn for themselves (see also Broad, 2006). The module that has been designed to help with this transition uses Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and the pedagogical concept of scaffolding the learning process. We refer to the ZPD as the space in which are students find themselves when we facilitate blended learning workshops where they engage with SmartSkills to develop their learner autonomy.

Data was collected from c.600 students during the Pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme held over eleven weeks. It included reflective student blogs, open interviews and feedback questionnaires involving students and staff, statistical data of attendance at non-compulsory elements of the module and final grades attained by students. In this ongoing study, we are examining the attitudes and changes in learning over the eleven weeks and the progress of our students. This is arrived at by comparing language level assessments in the students’ first week; data collected during the programme, and the students’ grades in their final assessments.

Findings are currently restricted to this early data collection but look exciting. For example, we have begun to see a significant statistical correlation between the students in the Zone of Proximal Development who first chose to attend non-compulsory elements of the course and then continued to do so. Their grades and learning in general indicate a greater improvement than those students who did not attend the non-compulsory elements. We refer to this as the process of ‘protonomy’ or ‘pro-active autonomy’, as the student begins to recognise the importance of autonomy in this particular form of learning, and applies skills, tools, techniques and strategies to meet the expectations of the programme.

In carrying out this research and discussing our preliminary findings we hope to contribute to the wider area of research into the impact on international students’ integration into UK Higher Education through learner autonomy and independent learning.

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A case study exploring the evolution of one online course design

14/09/2015

Get Ready for Southampton

This month’s blogpost is by Julie Watson, Head of eLearning in the Department of Modern Languages:

Since 2011, all incoming University of Southampton international students have been offered a free online course to help them prepare for university life and study before their arrival. The course called ‘Get Ready for Southampton’ (GRfS) has its roots in a tutored online preparatory course taken annually between 2005 and 2010 by up to 200 international students before going onto a pre-sessional course in EAP. As that course grew, so its learning design changed and in its new ‘skin’, GRfS now draws between 2000 and 2500 participants each time it is run. Pre-sessional students have been joined on the course by direct entry international students, Erasmus exchange students, visiting scholars as well as next year’s wannabe students of Southampton.

A recent study has focused on exploring how the course has evolved over the past ten years and the part that international students themselves have played as agents of change in this process. The role of students in influencing educational change has received particular interest in recent years (see e.g. JISC Change Agents Network, 2010) and studies have been undertaken elsewhere in areas such as listening to student feedback about institutional implementation of learning technologies, involving students as partners in course design, using learner-generated content. Given the length of time that our online course has run, I wanted to take a long view on course evolution and examine the role of student agency as well as the impact of parallel developments in educational and Web. 2.0 technologies.

The results have been interesting and have shown student impact across the course. A notable shift has taken place from small tutor-directed groups to a much larger open and fluid format, which allows students to have much greater influence in the direction of the course and, in this sense, also generate content. The teacher’s role has shifted as the phenomenon of MOOCs is also showing. The growth in the role played by the social aspect of the course together with the Web 2.0 proliferation of social networking tools and technologies has led to students making the choices of course tools and organising use amongst themselves – especially in the multicultural context of participants. The provided content of this course has also undergone significant change since making podcasts for education (see e.g. Salmon, 2009) marked a move away from purely text-based content at least seven or eight years ago. In many cases, including our own open content has eased the path of course design in recent years.

The study was presented at ALT-C this year and will be written up for publication in the proceedings. More information about the online course is available from the Get Ready for Southampton page on the eLanguages website.

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