How can centralised academic skill services best meet student needs? The combined effect of changes in student engagement, financial pressures on universities, technology advancements and the expansion of commercial providers may mean it’s time to revisit how your institutional skills service operates. Here, we pose seven questions to help shape the process.
Are the intended outcome(s) of academic skills support defined?
Academic skills have the potential to impact on multiple student outcomes, such as retention, continuation, student satisfaction, attainment or graduate outcomes. Establishing the specific intended outcomes allows you to effectively plan how to target, monitor and measure the impact of interventions.
An access and participation plan outlines the actions that a university will take to improve students’ equality of opportunity for access, success and progression. This can provide an excellent vehicle to consider where best to focus academic skills interventions.
Are cross-team remits clear?
Within a university, multiple stakeholders are often involved in the delivery of academic skills support – for example, learning development practitioners, academic writing specialists, librarians, digital skills trainers, maths tutors and English as a second language tutors. University support may also be supplemented by commercial providers.
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The super-convergence trend in the 2010s saw many academic skills-focused teams merged or their responsibilities redefined. These teams should now be working efficiently. But where disparate teams still operate, prioritise bringing stakeholders together to ensure remits are clear and to avoid unnecessary duplication. Make sure to consider the consistency of referral processes to academic skills support teams, via personal academic tutors, lecturers and other support teams. That way, the teams can develop strategies to help students more effectively and avoid confusion and communication challenges. Students are then more likely to get support upon first contact, instead of being passed from team to team.
Is data effectively used to target support?
Use data to find out where to target your support. In addition to Office for Students B3 data and National Student Survey results, use internal metrics, such as student engagement analytics, to identify priority faculties, schools or courses that could benefit from the extra help.
Once you’ve defined where most significant inequalities of opportunity exist, why not consider the secondment of academic skills professionals? Practitioners can then foster closer working relationships with course teams and, in turn, more directly contribute to the design and delivery or new teaching or assessment practices. It will also provide more ready access to the specific student groups who would most benefit from accessing additional academic skills support.
Are students able to access support when they need it?
University students have increasingly complex lives, and many will juggle studying with working and/or caring commitments. The provision of support during the traditional nine-to-five day may fall short of their needs. Historically, out-of-hours support would have been limited to online guides and learning materials. However, many universities have increasingly sought to supplement on-campus support with commercial providers that offer on-demand remote guidance on a 24/7/365 basis.
Recently, online academic writing feedback services have embraced AI, as it’s quicker, more consistent, provides more feedback and is widely available compared with employing writing specialists.
Some AI online services automatically provide rewrites for student work and prevent students from learning and developing their writing skills by thinking through the suggested improvements on their work. Others offer general feedback on student writing, such as ensuring there is subject-verb agreement in a sentence, without a rewritten version, requiring the student to understand the feedback and apply it to their writing. It offers the student a chance for experiential learning and improvement of their writing skills.
With the technology improving, students will soon be able to engage with trained chatbots and ask specific academics skills questions.
Is there an integrated promotion plan?
Academic skills provision promotion must be well coordinated, given that services could potentially be delivered by multiple centralised teams alongside a commercial provider(s). Employ a single website that acts as a one-stop shop for all academic skills services and resources.
Likewise, embed an integrated and cohesive communication plan that encompasses induction and ongoing signposting – eg, student newsletters, virtual learning environment messaging, social media and on-campus posters.
Are there consistent institutional approaches to evaluation?
Follow TASO guidance related to Office for Students standard of evidence when designing and undertaking evaluation of academic skills work. Prioritise securing “causality” evidence (type 3), followed by “empirical enquiry” evidence (type 2) and, as a fallback, “narrative” evidence (type 1). Not all academic skills practitioners will be specialists in research, so commission researchers to undertake cross-institutional impact evaluation projects that will encompass the work of all academic skills teams.
Think about how the academic skills teams record their interactions with students and log the results, as using different systems can make it difficult to compare the collected data.
Are academic skills specialists empowered to support curriculum development?
Through their work with students, academic skills practitioners will have valuable insights into the effective design and delivery of teaching, learning and assessment. As such, there are significant benefits to engaging these practitioners in curriculum development.
Engaging in critical reflection of how university services are organised, being delivered and potential for enhancements will be an ongoing priority for all teaching and learning leaders. The seven questions in this article could be employed beyond academic skills teams and also be used as the basis for guiding reviews of other higher education student services, such as student support or careers teams.
Steve Briggs is director of learning and teaching excellence and Ralitsa Kantcheva is senior learning development tutor, both at the University of Bedfordshire.
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