Elevate Team and Student Induction for specific courses

We'll be providing a slightly different approach to student induction to e-learning tools at the individual programme or module level for the 2011/12 academic year. One of the key reasons for this is effectiveness. Generic inductions offer little engagement to students, and are difficult for central teams to provide as we don't know the specifics of the course, it's delivery or assessment strategies. Therefore, the focus will be on working very closely with lecturers staff to ensure they are able to provide their own student induction. This will include, ensuring there are appropriate exit strategies to more help.

A typical example would be to develop a 30 minute session which a member of the course team can deliver, which includes video (screencasts), and is mapped closely to what the student will be using over the first few months of the course.

Outside of the staff controlled tools (Wolsey) we'll also be providing a number of video based introductions for students on tools they might wish to use as part of their own, personalised learning network.

For student induction we are offering the following service;

Wolsey

We'll support lecturer staff to design their Wolsey specific induction sessions (but we do not run them ourselves) - we'll direct staff to appropriate student support material (video based how to guides) which they might use, and to enhance effectiveness we'll encourage staff to make them very specific on actual uses within the first month of starting the course. The design will be dependent on the type of tools they'll be using in the short term. Therefore, a generic provision of Wolsey induction is not likely to be effective. In some cases, staff might want to provide an online induction in the initial period.

Mahara (e-Portfolio)

Given the Mahara service is a pilot, we'll be more hands on in terms of our support for student inductions for this tool, through the provision of a 20 minute taster session

Student "owned" e-learning tools

The Elevate Team will be providing a number video tasters around using key technologies which could add value to the student experience. These technology tasters will include;

• enhancing your learning and personal learning network through Twitter


• opening up opportunities for collaboration using Google Docs


• social bookmarking using Diigo