On Tuesday Su organised a meeting to discuss the ideas to be brought forward next week at her Small Changes, Big Difference event in the Sociology Department next week. Apparently there’s a lot of course restructuring going on in Sociology at the moment, a good opportunity to work a bit of IBL into the new regime.

Most of the ideas we discussed centred around ways to make better use of small group tasks to give students more responsibility for their own seminars. A recurrent problem was the issue of encouraging students take actions which in an IBL sense ought to be student-led. We talked about the implications of assigning more of the final module mark for group work, presentations, peer assessment, and even just making that hazy criterion of “seminar participation” actually mean something. We thought some kind of (in)formal meet-up outside of seminars, like reading groups, would be instrumental in making sure people got their preparation done so seminars would flow well and be useful. We had various ideas for some kind of online collaboration space based around seminars, for blogging, continuing discussions, collating good references or mind-mapping topics from week to week to help draw relations between different issues studied (although I hope it doesn’t end up on MOLE…)

Some of our ideas we acknowledged would require quite a change in culture for both staff and students. For this reason we thought it most feasible to bring in some of these new concepts for first years and have them permeate the department gradually (plus first year is non-assessed so people who don’t like group work or giving presentations would have time to develop the necessary new skills). Informal dissertation presentations were suggested as a way to encourage interaction between second years and final years. Second years get a much-needed impression of the requirements and possibilities of a dissertation, and final years would get another chance to practice presenting their ideas, and the benefit of another set of minds challenging them. I think there’s scope for more of this kind of inter-year exchange, which can really enhance the community of a department.

I was really excited by the discussion we had, and I’m thinking about how these ideas could be transferred over to other departments. Next week we’ll be putting them to staff, and hopefully ironing out details of their implementation

The SAN were highly praised at the LTEA conference last summer, and one of the attending delegates was so impressed by our high level of motivation amongst other things, that he invited me and two other Student Ambassadors to come to his University and give two 2nd year Undergraduate business students a presentation.

Once we sat down to discuss the session, it was only then that we realised it would be two 1.5hour sessions, with a small presentation followed by a workshop… which we had to plan, from scratch and then run ourselves! Nervous? Only a little bit.

With two fellow Student Ambassadors, Claire and Ali, we came up with the idea of linking the skills that IBL gives you with graduate jobs and employment, hence the title of our workshop ‘IBL and employability’. It was initially hard to get the students interested in what we were talking about and for them to see how it was relevent to them. When the workshop began, some students didn’t understand the point of IBL, and saw it only as an excuse for lecturers to do no work. To persuade them we firstly explained what IBL is; many things but essentially proactive learning, and different types of learning which involves both asking and answering your own questions. We then asked the students what Skills IBL gives you? Well, you can probably all name lots but here are a few to set you off.

 Problem solving, team work, independent study, research skills, report writing, organisiation, data analysis, confidence…

Some students still needed more convincing of these benefits, so Ali, Claire and myself returned to the front to give real examples of IBL activities and subsequent skills we gained, in turn asking for examples from the audience. Other students were able to do this well, and gave great examples which helped the students who were at first sceptical of IBL, think along the same lines. We returned to the workshop asking students to use examples of the skills IBL gave them to complete a graduate application to the Co-op.

By the close of the session, students were feeding back answers to the class and could identify how IBL helped them aquire these skills. What we found impressive was that all the handouts were taken away.

At the end of the session we had an open discussion with the class about any ideas they had which could possibly create more IBL in the classroom. They had some fantastic ideas, such as online podcasts created by the students for the students, an online blog where they could share ideas for essay questions. They also suggested different methods of groupwork, such as presentations to give them the skills they thought would be important and they thought they could improve on.

The session was so sucessful that we are currently in the process of collaborating with the Careers Service to see if we can work with them to get students to realise the benefits of IBL, skills gained and link these to employability. We would run a similar workshop to the one described above which would help students realise the skills they already have. Ali, Claire and myself are looking forward to the outcome of this, as I am sure the rest of you are.

<

I found this quote in some Geography IBL documents and I think it nicely and easily sums up IBL for the new student Tag Line you are after:

 IBL refers to a range of approaches to learning that are based around processes of self-directed inquiry. Students conduct inquiries which are designed to enable them to actively explore questions and problems within their discipline.

Its major points are that IBL is proactive and self directed and involves the process of actively exploring questions and problems