Introduction

The UofC Building Capacity Project (locally known as Captcha) aims to use technologies to enhance the experience of new entrants into HE, building upon lessons learnt from previous JISC projects and research.  The UofC project aims to address the issue of enhancing the newly enrolled student experience at an institutional level through two key activities:

1. The exploration and piloting of social networking sites and/or the institutional VLE to give students pre-entry access to one another and to the institution
2. Publish student generated content that addresses key themes in the student experience. 

Both these aims will only be achieved if the UofC project involves and works with services and faculties across the institution.   

How this literature review has been conducted:

The results from this literature review have fallen naturally into two distinct areas:

1. Publications that are a synthesis of research (Section A).  These provide findings from a range of studies and provide advice on how to approach the use of technology to enhance the student experience.  The recommendations in this section (section A) provided the UofC project with a context and background from which the project could safely make certain assumptions.
2. Project reports (Section B ) that can give the UofC project very directive ‘signposts’ on how to turn the assumptions derived from section A into reality in our own context.

Literature review summary

The search for relevant reports followed the key themes identified in the bid as follows: user-generated content; transition; induction;  first year experience;  retention; work-based learning; mentoring; linking student and official site areas;  the development of existing institutional systems;  the deployment of specific tools (wikis, podcasts, blogs etc.); and the role of individual agents or ‘champions’ in pioneering new software.

Close attention was directed towards strategies for the recruitment and retention of student participants. While some projects had used material rewards, such as vouchers or competition prizes, a number of others reported that students were more interested in intangible benefits. These ranged from the value of participation for a curriculum vitae to the associated kudos among peers to more altruistic motives related to  helping future students.

Across the full range of reports, there were surprisingly few concerned specifically with transition, induction and, or, the first year experience. The UoC project is keen to investigate early access to the VLE.  Relatively few studies appear to have tackled this.  Those directly concerned with user-generated content included TWOLER, HELLO, SPACE-fD  and WIPEL. The LExDis project was dedicated to the production of user-generated content for students with disabilities.

Several new themes emerged d which will be important for researchers to bear in mind as the Cumbria project unfolds. The increasing diversity of the student population recurred throughout. Accordingly the project will need to acknowledge and accommodate the corresponding diversity in aims and expectations, in prior experience, both of technology and of education and also differences in values and beliefs. 

Several studies reported ‘a big skills gap’ between students (MORI  / WIPEL / LEaD  /  WALES / LLiDA ). A report by the Open University (January 2009) warned against making ‘assumptions about students’ skills with tools’  Although students might be very familiar with using Facebook for example,  they may lack the confidence or  digital proficiency to deploy the software creatively in an unfamiliar context. There were repeated references to differing  levels of sophistication in manipulation of digital literacies and to students’ need for access to support. Researchers underlined the role of thorough training and induction for those (staff included) who needed it.

One report (WIPEL) drew attention to the communication of multiple identities social, professional and academic, online. The authors stressed the importance of alerting students to the different levels and modes of formality and informality, to make explicit  the socio-cultural practices underlying  the processes of technology.

Several studies noted the critical importance of sustaining frequent  communication between partners and team members (face to face as well as online) and the readiness to be responsive and adapt to changing contexts over time.

Section C outlines the projects that UofC read, but felt that they were of less significance to UofC project that those in Section B.

Section D summarises our next steps.

Authors: Mary Ashworth, Jeremy Benson, Sarah Chesney

June 30th, 2010.