By Becky Menday
About the Project
As part of a faculty commitment to student voice and co-creation shown in the Education strategy this project was a collaboration between two students Becky Menday and Destiny Roberts and the faculty digital learning advisor Jenny Hughes. The aim was to collect student views on Blackboard course design in order to provide guidance to staff. The students led focus groups and usability testing to gather student opinion on Blackboard organisation, usability, accessibility and consistency across courses.
Project output
- Written report hosted on the Faculty of Science Student Voice Evidence Portfolio
- Video showing examples of good and bad course design
- Gave talks to faculty of education director and her team + digital learning team
- Course specific guidance for courses moving to Ultra.
Becky's reflection:
Skills learnt:
- Project management
- Teamwork + collaboration
- Public speaking
- Written communication + report writing
- Focus groups + usability testing
- Communicating with a diverse range of people: students, lectures, professional services (VLE team, DLT)
Being a digital education experience assistant has been a vital experience. Working in a team composed of an undergraduate student, Destiny Roberts, and a professional services advisor, Jenny Hughes, showed me how successful a supportive and collaborative environment can be. I was introduced to Trello which helped keep track of team tasks efficiently. Jenny provided the knowledge we needed to set up our research aims and methods. Destiny and I divided tasks, I took lead on focus groups, and Destiny took lead on the usability testing. However, we still encouraged each other's input in both methods to produce a cohesive output on student feedback.
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As a PhD student I do have some experience of project management, but this has mainly been self-driven for my own research. Having the opportunity to drive a team project was an amazing experience. Being in a supportive environment where everyone used their expertise effectively made conducting the focus groups a smooth process. I focused on the research element by generating queries to ask the students. I then led the focus group with the support of Destiny who took notes and asked follow up questions. Learning how to guide the discussion smoothly and succinctly was challenging, especially as a couple of students were more vocal than others. To ensure a safe and inclusive environment I set out some ground rules focussing on being respectful to each other, and that disagreement was encouraged. I found getting each student to give a one-word answer at the start around the theme of the focus group, Blackboard, encouraged students to speak more freely and get involved. One tip I would give is to add a reflective element at the end of the focus group. I asked students if any of the discussions they had heard today had caused them to change their opinion. I was sceptical that this would work but quite frequently students did state a change of opinion. I think this highlights the importance of encouraging student conversations to empower change.
Taking a project from conception to completion was a rewarding experience. After the usability testing was conducted, we decided to conduct another focus group. I got to interweave the research from the usability testing into the focus group to ask more nuanced questions, focussing on where students disagreed, that triggered more in-depth discussions. This really helped to add detail to the report.
A highlight of this project was generating outputs that I saw got implemented immediately. It made the work we did feel important and useful. Feeding our research back to the digital learning team in professional services as well as to the faculty of education director and her team demonstrated how far reaching and applicable the work we did was. Overall, this project was a rewarding experience that diversified my skill base and let me work with some amazing people in the process.