Session Outline

Fostering Employability within Personal Tutoring for Undergraduate Public Health Students: A Case Study

Genevieve M Breau (University of Greenwich)

The BSc. (Hons) Public Health and Public Health Extended programmes at the University of Greenwich are professionally focused, applied programmes in the social sciences tradition. However, unusually for health professional programmes, they are not externally accredited by a self-regulating professional body. Graduates of these programmes also pursue diverse career paths, for example working for the NHS, local government, national government departments and agencies, the voluntary and social care sectors, private industry, and postgraduate studies in a variety of disciplines. It is also important to note that the majority of students on these programmes are UK students from non-traditional university backgrounds.

As a method of better engaging students with their studies, and making them aware of their diverse career opportunities, starting in 2022-2023 the personal tutors for Year 1 public health students have collaborated with the Employability Skills Advisors (assigned to the faculty but part of a larger employability service) at the University of Greenwich to make students aware of the support their service provides to students and alumni through promotion in lectures and course website announcements. There have also been group personal tutorials to support employment-based skills (i.e. searching for volunteer positions, preparing a professional CV) to students. In these sessions, students are encouraged to undertake voluntary positions with local health-related organizations, with representatives from these organizations delivering presentations, both in tutorials and at the university-wide Careers Fair. Representatives from local employers also describe their career path to their current positions.

This work in personal tutorials and suggested volunteer positions contributes to the employability-related events led by the Employability Lead for public health and mandatory employment-based learning module in Year 3 of the programme. In this presentation, the lead presenter will explain the rationale for promoting student engagement through employability-based initiatives, its relation to the literature on student employability, and how the collaboration between the public health staff team and Employability Skills Advisors has evolved over the past two academic years.

Co-authors: Genevieve Breau, Linda Cole, Luisa Ares Vilas, Monika Varga, Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo

Using MS OneNote to deliver online workshops for academic tutors.

Karen Kenny (University of Exeter)

The session I want to share in this lightning talk is designed to support tutors who work with PGTs. This is an area of work which can be overlooked but is vitally important. The face-to-face workshop is lively, stimulating discussion and facilitates shared practice, so I wanted to retain that vitality in the digital space.

I wanted to convert a highly interactive workshop into a digital format, to allow me to deliver the session remotely. Our university is located across several campuses, and I have found that delivering workshops in the virtual space allows more tutors to attend.

I wondered 'where' to host the session. It was important to be able to allow participants to collaborate in the same way as they could in real life. There are several possibilities, but I decided to promote the use of OneNote as a working space for tutors. All of our tutors at Exeter have an MS Team for Education, and associated Class Notebook ready to activate, and prepopulated with their tutee groups (Kenny 2021). It seemed that using it for this workshop would be a useful way of reinforcing this message and modelling best practice. I also really like the almost limitless ‘whiteboard’ that a Notebook provides, and the multimodal ways of recording in it. The workshop includes a video to provoke responses and establish a ‘case study’ of sorts to begin the conversation. This is a recording of a PGT student, at Exeter, who agreed to share her experiences with a wider audience. The notebook then provides a collaborative space in which breakout groups can work, and space to gather ideas, and share concerns.

This talk will showcase the working space that I developed in order to host these one hour workshops in the MS Notebook and Teams environment.

Establishing student perceptions and experiences of personal tutoring within a Scottish University using a mixed methods approach.

Kim Allan (Glasgow Caledonian University)

Recruitment, retention, attainment and student experience are all influenced by the student’s life experience both before arriving at university and while studying. Poorer mental health, increasing widening participation and a wider range of student demographics all have an effect on student experience and outcomes. Good support for students is essential for recruitment, retention and attainment and it is important to assess what students want and need from an effective personal tutoring system.

The School of Health and Life Sciences (SHLS) at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) has 8211 students registered across both undergraduate and post graduate programmes of study. 13.6% have a declared disability, 16% are from outside Scotland and 61% are classified as widening participation students.

This mixed methods study utilising an explanatory sequential design is being undertaken as part of a PhD programme of study. It aims to establish a deeper understanding of the perceptions, expectations and experience of the personal tutoring provision with the SHLS. It is planned to combine two established data collection tools, A SERQUAL survey, a quantitative data collection tool and Listening Rooms, a qualitative data collection method.

SERQUAL surveys use paired questions to establish perceptions and experiences of students to assess student satisfaction with the personal tutoring provision.

Listening Rooms captures conversations between friend pairs, who take part in conversation around themes. Participants will be asked to use six prompt cards to guide their conversations. Each prompt will be derived from the quantitative data collected in stage 1 and supported by three sub-questions to help guide the conversation.

By utilising an explanatory sequential design, it is hoped to gain a deeper insight to student experience of Personal Tutoring and inform any future changes to the personal tutoring system at an institutional level.

The aim of this lightening talk is to discuss the study design and approach of the data collection and inform a novel combination of data collection tools to utilise the student voice to establish a deep understanding of what students expect, need and value from a personal tutoring system.