Law and TASH

Met this morning with Zoe Ollerenshaw in Law who lectures on the Legal Practice Course and is about to take up the roles of chair of the department's Teaching Quality committee and of teaching advocate across the department's full UG provision. Our conversation ranged over a wide range of skills areas of importance to Law UGs, students on the LPC, and PG students on a range of masters courses. Particular challenges mentioned, amongst others, were those encountered by second language overseas students on masters programmes, given the emphasis upon semantic meanings stressed in legal discourse (and for whom the department is developing compulsory sessions with ELTC); LPC students who, to an extent, have to "unlearn" some of the more fence sitting and discursive elements of UG writing conventions (in favour of some plain speaking advice to clients who wanted to know specific answers to specific questions); and the more general challenge of supporting the huge numbers of UG students throughout their studies given very high staff to student ratios.

There are clearly approaches TASH can learn from Law and LPC, including around the transition from UG to LPC and what this has to say about academic literacy .v. graduate professionalism, and writing (and being assessed) for/by different audiences. Likewise, Zoe sees that TASH and the 7 sk/hills currently outlined pretty much cover all the boxes Law will want to tick - and has the potential to assist greatly in developing a more coherent package of skills enhancement and reflective learning for UGs over the course of their studies.

Zoe is keen to remain involved, will be at the 17 July meeting, and will liaise with Tash Semmens and Norma Hird, both of whom are also closely involved in a "feedback taskforce" and other teaching initiatives within Law. Hopefully we'll be able to have at least one representative from Law at each of the meetings going forward.

Geography case study: embedding ELTC MOLE language tutorials

I attended a very positive meeting yesterday with Richard Simpson, Alice Lawrence and Victor (sorry, Victor, I didn't catch your surname) - all from ELTC - Paul Wigfield (MOLE czar) and Steve Wise (Geography). Steve was the chief instigator and is concerned to address standards of written English amongst home undergraduate students in his dept. In particular, grammatical and other problems which recur and, it appears, are on the increase in many students' work.

It was helpful from a TASH perspective to observe in practice precisely the kind of process we hope to facilitate more easily through the medium of the tutor guides and other staff facing materials. Steve had only recently been put on to the ELTC online language tutorials (by Alice?) and, having now spent a limited amount of time perusing them, can see that many aspects of these provide ready made solutions to many of the areas he wishes to address with his students - hopefully the TFGs (tutor-facing guides) will help to shortcircuit this realisation for others in the future. Better still, Steve now plans to develop aspects of one of his first year modules to make more embedded use of these materials, and is considering supporting this through use of the first year tutorial system. He plans to develop a small amount of new material and possibly tinker with small aspects of the ELTC materials too (particularly to make the grammar tutorials and/or the way the subject of grammar is approached much less technical - since the ELTC materials were originally developed with a second language audience in mind), and is willing to work with TASH to use this as a disciplinary case study to illustrate how more generic materials can be made to work effectively in subject specific contexts.

Particular outcomes then:

• Steve to work on tailored UG "Writing for Geographers" materials using ELTC tutorials as a key component, and to share lessons learned with TASH; it would be good if we can find someone on 17 July to do something similar for PG writing and/or in the pure sciences too;
  
• Alice and Victor to work on TASH TFGs in relation to the ELTC online tutorials - we may want to break these down into guides addressing the needs of first- and second-language students respectively;
• Richard, who knows the back history of the ELTC resources, is happy for these to be shared more widely via MOLE (e.g. the plan is for all 1st year Geog UGs to have automatic access next acad year, rather than having to sign up to be enrolled), and in principle (as Lynn Parker has also hinted for the library info tutorials) is happy for some or more of the tutorials to be lifted out of MOLE and made more easily available via web pages;
• Paul has confirmed it should not be a big technical task to take tutorials such of these out of MOLE and place them onto open web pages if this seems to be the most effective way forward as the project progresses (the main issue for TASH here being that we want to signpost people as accurately as possible ... but if pointing to a MOLE resource, can only do so to the front page and not link any deeper to specific elements of a tutorial or resource);
• TASH will support Steve, Alice and Victor with development time etc. as appropriate, and may also be able to help facilitate some student focus group work around the materials Steve plans to develop (e.g. using our links with the CILASS-SAN and union education officer);
• We need to have a word with Diana Ward (ELTC), who will be working with English Lit next year (Bob McKay, Brendan Stone?) on some first year language development support.

Steve, Alice and hopefully Victor will all be at 17 July meeting where we can begin to put some of these pieces alongside other disciplinary and faculty case study priorities. Thanks to all for a very productive 45 minutes.

Feedback from the Engineering Group at the 24th June TASH event

Feedback from the Engineering Group:

Group membership: Plato Kapranos (Materials Eng), Juliet Wilson (plagiarism working group ) , Jen Rowson (Mech Eng), Tom O’Brien (student – Biomedical Engineering) , Alice Lawrence (ELTC), Linda Gray (ACSE)

Priorities/ what does Engineering need from TASH:

• Lab reports – how to write. (Please note that Tom O’Brien is writing a guide. Also Jen Rowson (Mech Eng) has a guide - see below)
• Observing that engineering students have lots of contact time early on, and that therefore engineering students appear to expect that all work must be done in contact time. Engineering departments want to move students on from much contact time/little independent work to little contact time/much independent work as their academic career progresses. To do this, one priority is to encourage student skill acquisition in information gathering and to get students to buy into doing this information gathering.
• Referencing – with a real need for consistency within departments and across departments. At the moment students are either told to use one method for one piece of work and another method for another, or they aren’t given a specific system to use at all.
• Helping students relate criteria used in assessment to examples of real work. Helping students understand how different assessment criteria reflect developmental stages.
• Helping to show students how they are expected to develop through their academic careers.
  

Resources already available:

• ELTC resources – online and face-to-face
• Library’s ISR , in which there is a specific Engineering hub (which ACSE contributed to)
• MATLAB tutorials – several available in University, and Tom is writing another MATLAB tutorial
• JAR’s (Anthony Rossiter's) animations on MOLE for systems related to modelling electrical circuits. JAR’s simulations on MOLE for pendulum and particle3D.
• MASH material – extensive support for Maths
• MECH eng has guides to
  o Writing lab reports
  o Literature reviews
  o Referencing
  o Plagiarism
• ACSE and AERO have material for educating about plagiarism and collusion, which has also been adopted by the Uni plagiarism working group
• Peter Judd (EEE) has developed some animations to support teaching the C programming language
  

How could TASH be used in departments:

• Linked to from student portal - with noticeable pop-up or other attention getting icon.
• Buy-in by lecturing staff, to include mention of during lectures/assignment descriptions. If appropriate could also demonstrate interaction with TASH during lectures
• Personal tutors – could devote personal tutorial session to showing tutees material on TASH
• Perhaps don’t talk about TASH much in induction, because of the information overload problem.
• “Foreground expectations” – repeatedly make it clear that lecturers intend students to use the TASH resource.
• Weekly calendar reminding students of academic schedule (specific to department), with mention of relevant material in TASH for the current assignment/task
  

Challenges for the TASH project:

• Making it specific enough for individual students
• Every department will want different things from it
• Finding material that is already available
• Embedding into the subject discipline, because TASH type material is not of itself interesting. For this reason a large example set for subject specific tutors will be necessary.
• Making resources available to allow students to catch up to already assumed levels. (This is a particular issue in the service-module oriented engineering faculty).
• Overseas students (of which the engineering faculty has a large number) – may be overwhelmed by visual information if their English language skills are weak, so the design needs to carefully limit the information on the page without being too simplistic therefore patronising.
• Overseas students’ previous experience of using IT will vary depending on country.