I shadowed Chrystina Martel today. I had the opportunity to attend a seminar in media studies, a German translation class and a philosophy lecture. It was both fascinating and useful.

Fascinating:

– What a joy it is to be a student! The exposure to smart people, the chance to learn in both structured and unstructured ways and the positive encouragement of debate. I’m a particular fan of studying a wide range of subjects.

– Translation is completely different with Google Translate and online translation aids. But using these tools properly is important (which is, I suppose, rather like using a dictionary…)

– Knowledge of correct English punctuation is given a great deal lower priority than it was in my day!

– More people come into the sessions later than I recall in my day…

Useful:

I entered into the process in order to see what use was made of a range of learning technologies, and how other parts of the student experience are impacted by IT.

– None of the three sessions made much use of IT – the seminar and translation class are all about interaction, while the philosophy lecturer uses Word for the prompts for his lecture.

– Use of ReCap is inconsistent.

– Putting material on Blackboard and allowing students to make the use of it which suits them, is well regarded. People need to know that the material is there, but don’t need it to be over-structured.

 – Attendance monitoring is a real faff. Different formats of paper signing sheets are used – and, apocyphallly, ‘some academics just don’t use them.’ Social norms are important – in some other countries,such as those using identity cards, this is much easier.

Now for Monday, when Chrystina has the doubtful priviledge of  gaining insights into how ISS works!

Yesterday (Friday) I shadowed Harriet. Normally her Friday is fairly busy, but this week two of her scheduled sessions didn’t happen, and the third, a 2-hour tutorial, only lasted about 30 minutes as students were fairly happy that they knew how to tackle the work set.

I met Harriet in the Robinson Library at 10:00 where she was working on her Stage 4 Mech Eng Team project. She is working with a team of 6 other students, and the whole team has been split into two groups. Harriet is working with two other students on a test rig (carried over from last year’s team project) related to the deflection of a foot (Harriet will be able to explain it much better than me). Someone else had written a draft interim report and Harriet was reviewing it on one of the Library PC clusters. I took along some reading of my own so that I could give Harriet some time to get on with her work, whilst still observing what she was up to and asking questions from time to time. At 11 we went to the tutorial, and returned to the Library after that. Shortly after one of Harriet’s group members called to ask if she fancied taking some measurements on the test rig. I met the other two members of Harriet’s group in the Mech Eng workshop. The room that they were working in was rather cold, certainly less than 19C.

After taking and recording measurements, which took about 45 minutes, we played hunt the free PC, which is is a particular challenge around midday. The cluster in Mech Eng was fully occupied, as was the one in the Old Library. We went to the Robinson Library and happened to turn up just as Moira Bent was finishing a booked session at 1. The two other members of Harriet’s group gave her some feedback on the changes she had made to the interim report. Harriet then spent a while on LinkedIn. I had always thought that this was just a Facebook for professionals to keep in touch on, but Harriet had been using it to get/keep in contact with various employers. In fact the two job offers that she had received had come through LinkedIn. I don’t know how much support we/the Careers Service are giving to this, but we need to ensure that our students have competitive advantage.

Earlier we had talked about feedback on coursework and examinations. Harriet had said that the former is very variable, some lecturers give very detailed feedback, others much less. Some use a standard pro forma, and this was appreciated.

At 3 Harriet had to leave the PC she was using because it was required for a booked session. She was able to get on another machine, although most of the cluster was very busy. With a few exceptions most students were actually doing work on their machines, rather than using Facebook. I left at that point, agreeing to shadow Harriet for another half day when she would expect to have more booked sessions.

I was shadowed today by Harriet, a Stage 4 MEng Mech Eng student. We deliberately chose one of Harriet’s lighter teaching days, but there were still a few classes that she was scheduled to attend, and I naturally didn’t want to interfere with them. There were a couple of meetings that I couldn’t get Harriet in to, one of which clashed with one of her lectures. I can understand the nervousness of others about allowing student shadows to attend meetings, but it was a pity, nonetheless. We have agreed that Harriet will shadow me for another half day to make up for this, and I am trying to get her into some other meetings in a couple of weeks’ time.

At the moment I am going through the ‘mods and regs’ process, so Harriet’s introduction to the work that I do was to proof read some MOFs. Gillian Whittaker and/or Lynne Dixon, the Faculty Office Quality Team, have already ironed out most of the problems by the time MOFs reach me, and I end up largely picking up typos. Harriet showed that she was more than a match for me, identifying missing full stops, inconsistent capitalisation, etc. She’ll probably find oodles of errors in this post! I hope that, unlike me, she is able to read a restaurant menu without correcting all the spelling mistakes.

Harriet was introduced to the rest of the staff on the first floor of the Faculty Office, in particular the two Scotts dealing with data entry of attendance monitoring, and (some of) the recruitment team. I went through some of the other matters I have to deal with from time to time. In particular I explained the External Examiner system, and the fact that I’m an EE elsewhere. It so happened that an email came in related to issues raised by an EE. We talked about the CASAP and my role as an FPLO. And here it so happened that an email came in from a CASAP participant requesting feedback on their Module Review (Part B of CASAP Module 1). Harriet questioned the significance of the 25-hour clock on my desk. I explained that this was given to me by some colleagues from Odessa who are participants in a TEMPUS SAFEGUARD project that I’m the coordinator for. While I was out at a meeting Lynne went through the previous FLTSEC, which Harriet had attended, indicating the follow-up actions that had to be taken.

Harriet attended a meeting with Bryn Jones (PG Dean), Jo Geary (Deputy Head of Admin), and Dave Ramsey (Faculty Accountant) where we discussed tuition fees being paid direct to Schools, and student planning numbers for the Faculty Office. Hearing about the Shadowing project Bryn immediately offered to participate.

I hope Harriet got something out of this. It probably all seemed very bitty, but that’s often the nature of the way I work. There were occasional interruptions with phone calls that needed an instant response, and whilst I tried to ignore my email, nevertheless I got drawn in to ensure that I missed nothing urgent. Maybe next time I should switch my machine off. There were a number of ‘time outs’ where it was necessary to give some background to the topic being discussed, and the people involved.

I’ll be shadowing Harriet a week on Friday. I hope her lecturers don’t feel intimidated, Harriet is going to forewarn them.