On May 21st, the Study Support Team and the Library got together to share different perspectives and points of views they have read in the article provided from the conversation under the title:

(When students fail, many do nothing about it. Here’s how unis can help them get back on track).

Article selection was based on the concept of the roles of study support and library through helping students who fails. The article discusses the research has been done at Swinburne university to understand reasons of failure, roles of academic advisors as well as the roles of students to improve academic progress after failure. The research has been conducted with 230 students who have been notified of their unsatisfactory academic progress.

Here is some of the main points discussed  in this meeting to help our students who are at risk of academic progress:

• Making sure understand their roles in the academic progress process and a suggestion has been raised that raising student awareness of the importance of academic progress in the orientation week would help students understands their academic responsibility to avoid an early failure in the first session.
• All universities have procedures to identify students who fail multiple units in a semester or fail the same unit multiple times. These processes would pick up students who fail half their units, especially in their first year.
• Study Support Team aims at changing behaviour and developing new study habits as well as building a personal support network.
• Most students named multiple and compounding reasons for failing, including financial struggles, disability, and care or work responsibilities. These underlying issues cannot be resolved quickly, by students or universities
• Everyone has a role to do helping students achieve well.

Recording can be accessed here:

https://charlessturt.zoom.us/rec/share/mQIrT8FDZST3na7VrV3BDD8LzSc2is3oKxAm43GbsUIczZBJ8dIJ34rJ5BJPlH4r.SA1Hau2olPaYJ5SM

On May 7th, the Study Support Team and the Library got together to share different Professional Associations they have found and are either a member of or are considering becoming a member of. This was building on the concept of the Communities of Practice discussed a few weeks ago.

A reminder that memberships to these associations can be subsidised by Study Group. The first step would be to write a case explaining how these relate to our roles and how they would benefit the delivery of our services.

Here is a list of different Associations presented in this meeting

VicTESOL  A professional association for those in Victoria focused on Teaching English  to Speakers of Other Languages

Tesol International Association  An international association to educators, researchers, administrators and students in the ELT field

Australian Library and Information Association   The national professional organisation for the Australian library and Information services sector

Council of Australian University Librarians   A leadership organisation for the University Libraries in Australia

International Association of University Libraries

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions  An international body representing the interests of library, information services and their users

Australian Institute of Training and Development  A professional membership organisation for Learning and Development Professionals across Australia

International Education Association of Australia   An association for individuals and organisations from across all sectors of the International Education Industry

Journal of Peer Learning

ISANA (International Students Advisers Network of Australia Inc) An international education association of Australian and New Zealand international education professionals

Association for Academic and Language Learning    An association which represents and supports academic language and learning educators in Australia

For more information and a discussion on these different Associations and Memberships,

View full recording here

On the 1st of May we discussed Virtual Rotation Stations as per Skolastika (2020)

The recording is linked here.

The article focuses on dividing classes into segments called ‘stations’:

1. Teacher-led station
2. Online Station
3. Offline Station
4. Extension Activity

These stations have been found to increase student engagement and independence.

For the online environment, these rotation stations can be facilitated through break-out rooms in zoom.

The main takeaways for our session were:

• these techniques can be trialled in online classes, with the explicit introduction of the model to students before hand.
• This model caters for “various types of students to achieve better learning results within a single classroom” (p. 54)
• engaging students can be very difficult when there is no previously established rapport. In the case of embedded support, reaching out to lecturers ahead of class and ascertaining which students might be amenable to facilitating peer engagement can be advantageous.
• The rotation models also hold the potential to be used in a simultaneous online/offline classroom, which can be explored further when the students return to campus.
• Structuring sections of class time around collaboration is encouraged, although it must be scaffolded to afford students the comfort and confidence to participate.
• Ice breakers play a crucial role, and must be based on low risk questions, with binary questions being most favourable, and open-ended questions to be avoided or used with more experienced/confident students

A trial of this station rotation is most likely to work in longer classes, such as a three hour lecture.

Overall it was good food for thought in terms of changing the norm of a classroom and how that might impact the student engagement and shake up some participation.

– Madelle