What motivates your students?

It's time for another cohort of students into the revised Bachelor of Nursing programme. The March intakes are always smaller - about 90 students. ECDL has been left out of this 'Cardiff Nursing Futures' curriculum and so I came up with the UniversIT Information Fluency Portfolio, launched it last October. What's brought me back to blog about it is the reflection that not many, if any, students from the September '12 cohort have engaged with the UIT portfolio. That's in spite of the fact that there are lots of ways we've embedded digital literacy into the curriculum. Students have to create a leaflet individually for one module, for another they work in groups to present a wiki-based health informational Website, we're doing D@SH.
This time it's different though.
Over the last years I have observed that students are motivated by various things. Assessment is of course the major one. But you cannot assess everything (unless you went to a type of 'Community Equity'ish way of assessing micro-contributions, as per my presentation at NLC2012 - link to blog entry ;).
Our students have to sign registers since the governing body requires them to study for a recorded 2300 theory hours. The tweak that I think has changed engagement this time, although it's quite early to be certain, started with a conversation with the programme manager. We agreed to dedicate one of the last days on the timetable for hours representing effort students expended completing their UIT portfolio. If they complete it to my satisfaction by then, they can get these 6 hours added to their total. If they do not, as you may have guessed, they have to make up the hours by completing their UIT portfolio, and there is a deadline for that. I'm laying on face-to-face sessions, notes of which are being posted in their group wiki (CampusPack) where I'm also listing the group names so that I can indicate which of them has finished their UIT portfolio. When they have all done that I will create a group-based certificate for them, I may even include a picture of the group if they can supply a suitable one. There is no deadline for the certificate, so that groups do not miss out if one member is late completing. In these ways I am keying into various types of motivation that stop short of the sharp stick compulsion of summative assessment but which will, I hope, reach deeply enough into the students' minds and lives to promote connections and build working knowledge. Did I mention that there's chocolate at my IT sessions? Strangely enough, the library's sessions with these students are also featuring chocolate this time around...

UniversIT Information Fluency Portfolio is go!

I have just launched the UniversIT Information Fluency Portfolio. This has been brewing for a while, ever since I started as 'Lecturer in Information Management and Teaching' back in 2001. As, I was told, the 1st year curriculum had no space for IT, apart from inductions, I taught important things in the 2nd and 3rd years. Ironically, a few years ago, ECDL became a 'good idea' and students spent vast swathes of their time learning pointless and stymying techniques and facts, never to be recalled or re-used after the exam. At least passing the first four modules of ECDL meant one less barrier to entry into 2nd year.

Feedback from one of these groups the other week confirmed what I knew all along: they valued my input but wanted it early in the programme. Now I have done that, although there is a little niggle in my mind about  the sequencing or timing of advice so that people have their minds attuned to realise when they're looking at a hugely time-saving technique.
Learning Objects Campus Pack allows me to create a wiki and use that as a template, publishing it to the individual students so that they all have their own copy of it to work on. But I wanted to make learning about the content scalable and to leverage the new 'group'/'community' philosophy of the revised curriculum. I'm offering the students different kinds of workshops.

1. UIT - Nominated individuals from each of the 21 groups are invited to three separate 2 hour sessions. They consult with their groups what they want to know and the 6-8 individuals have my undivided attention to ask questions and find out how to do whatever it is they want, from the range of topics within the UniversIT Information Fluency Portfolio.
2. IT extra - These run alongside the UIT sessions. Anyone from the prescribed groups can come although they will not receive the attention that UIT reps will.
3. CCC - Chocolate Computer Club: A dropin-style session where I provide a box of chocolate and anyone can come along, so long as we're not full. 

I've created sign-up lists in Blackboard so that students can book a slot if they need to.
When every member of their allocated group has completed their individual UniversIT Information Fluency Portfolios we will arrange to meet up and I'll viva them. If it is clear that they have all done the work, I will award a group certificate. They have as long as they want to complete this.

Contingency in use of Digital Tools

Once again, on the theme of implicit digital literacies...
I have been talking with students recently about reference management software. Amongst others, the students can choose between:

1. Endnote
2. Endnote Web
3. Zotero

The first two are 'supported' at Cardiff University: there are 'styles' for both the School's in-house Harvard as well as Cardiff University's variant. Option 1 is expensive while Option 2 is quite clumsy to use (requires signup on-campus and 'nasty' passwords). Zotero is a dream to use and it's free, although the School's house style for Harvard is not available currently (another job for muggins perhaps).
However, with the recent demise of drop.io, it could be argued that recommending the open source, unsupported Zotero exposes students to an unacceptable risk. What happens when the student fails to submit coursework on time because Zotero failed? Of course, couching recommendations with cautionary remarks chill-off students from engaging with and benefiting from a tool that is unlikely to fail.
Expert use of tools like Zoterio and drop.io will have incurred a certain amount of investigation into the robustness/life expectancy of the tool. An expert will have a sense of whether it is necessary to devise a contingency plan in the event of the tool's unavailability, whether temporary (read a book for a bit) or permanent (start looking for an alternative that might be compatible with your archive).
Whether using email, online filestore, collaboration spaces, blog, mindmapping, bookmark sharing or reference management, all of them may suffer 'outages'. But this is something users have come to live with, it is implicitly part of working in these ways.
It is easy to demonstrate the benefits of Zotero. Communicating the 'small print' is far more tricky. But I am at a loss as to how to convey the 'tool appraisal' and 'back-up and rescue' skills mentioned above without completely losing my audience.

The Chocolate Computer Club rides again

It was Spring 2006 and, in frustration, at the lack of attendance at IT lab-based sessions, I asked the Undergraduate Student/Staff Panel, 'What then can motivate students to come to IT sessions'?

The immediate answer from some grinning wag was, 'Chocolate!'. Then, when approached by an enterprising librarian, wanting to start semi-formal drop-in information fluency sessions, I joined the two concepts together and came up with, 'The Chocolate Computer Club'.

The tag-lines were sure to flow freely, but I started with:

For those of us who need a reason

and

30 minutes of smooth luxurious IT (15 minutes tuition, 15 minutes practice)

Apart from being very corny, I was quite sure that the concept was half-baked from the kick-off. I mean, who was I kidding that IT could be 'smooth' and/or 'luxurious'?!

By the Autumn of 2007 I had to admit in my appraisal that...

'The Chocolate Computer Club was abandoned after poor attendances'. I was alarmed to hear later on that there had been rumours, spread by staff, that the chocolate would be present in name only. In any case, my choice of chocolate was probably amiss... On reflection, a bar of it may not be something you comfortably share amongst a group of poeple you dont know... I've gone for something more self-contained.

This time of year there are good offers on the tins, so I've been to the shops and got my chocs.

This is not going to be a 'drop-in' session though - it's firmly on the timetable, but students are not obliged to come... there'll be no register (our students have to show they've attended a number of theory hours to keep the bursery flowing).

The session is being run instead of en masse inductions, with a sign-up list in Blackboard for students to claim a place. This is somewhat counter-intuitive because the people who are likely to attend are perhaps less likely to use an electronic tool... However, a reasonable number seem to have managed it so far.
In the event, seven students, wide-eyed and avowedly IT-phobic came along. We had a merry time shaking heads about how aweful computers are and how slow the University systems are, etc. Apart from my brief skit about IT knowledge needing to be founded upon problem-solving, the students asked about their issues with accessing ECDL from home, navigating Blackboard and how to master online submission. We spent a while going through these but actually, of course, the students were as much a help to each other as anything I said.
Promoting connections... with chocolate ;-)