Excellence Gateway
Published: 17 December 2009
This case study was produced by JISC Regional Support Centre for Northwest on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.
Sector relevance: Further education and Sixth Form colleges
Keywords: Improving responsiveness to learners, improving institutional effectiveness, induction, learning resource centre induction, management of resources, online tutorial, video
West Cheshire College has utilised the Intute Informs tool to create an online induction tutorial for its new students. Beginning with an engaging video, which highlights all the Learning Resources services, the tutorial enables students to work live online, familiarising themselves with the College network, library catalogue, virtual learning environment (VLE) and other key College resources. The Intute service is supported by JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee).
West Cheshire College is a vocational college with three main campuses located in Chester, Ellesmere Port and Capenhurst. The learners are drawn from the West Cheshire and South Wirral regions. There are approximately 2,000 full-time and 20,000 part-time learners studying at the College.
The vocational courses are offered at various levels, and students learn practical skills in real work environments. The wide range of courses includes Care and Childcare, Construction, Logistics, and Public Services.
The College has Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) status for Social and Healthcare and in Automotive Manufacturing.
Informs is a flexible, adaptive tool for the creation of interactive online tutorials. The easy-to-use software produces a 'Guide at the Side' split-screen design, enabling students to learn using live websites.
There is also a database of tutorials, created by users as a shared community resource, which are available to be reused and repurposed by other registered users.
Informs has been developed by Intute, a free online service to help users find the best web resources for study and research. Intute is funded by the JISC.
When a restructuring of enrolment and induction responsibilities severely limited the opportunities that Learning Resources staff at West Cheshire College could offer to new students as part of their induction programme, the team had to rethink how it would introduce students to its services.
The team was asked to compress the Learning Resources induction – which included how to access and use the College network, library catalogue, VLE and other key College resources – into one short session; this was to replace an induction which had comprised comprehensive separate IT and resources sessions, plus a 45-minute library tour.
At the same time, Anthony Beal, Learning Resources Section Leader, and the team were aware of other challenges for their ‘traditional' face-to-face inductions due to:
The Informs tutorials
Senior Learning Resources Officer Tricia Haddock was keen to explore how the team might develop something other than simply a workbook to hand to students to replace the previous facilitated sessions.
Ideas that the team discussed included an online resource that could be used as part of a facilitated session or on its own. Around the same time, Anthony attended a JISC event in North Wales, where he was introduced to Informs by a member of the Intute team.
At first Anthony asked Tricia to just develop a Library Guide using Informs, but they soon realised that it had further possibilities for the inductions.
Tricia was able to work directly from the existing printed induction guides to put together the content for the online tutorials. The information she presented in the left-hand frame of Informs included:
Students follow the instructional elements of the left-hand frame by working live on the internet in the right-hand-frame. The team still provides a face-to-face session for new students, but this is facilitated (where it provides help and advice as needed) rather than leading them through step by step.
The Learning Resources services video
The idea for producing a video to highlight the Learning Resources services evolved during a staff development week at the College, when staff were asked to produce something to represent their department.
It took its inspiration from the video ‘A Vision of Students Today', produced in 2007 by Michael Wesch (in collaboration with 200 students) at Kansas State University; the team was impressed with the powerful way that the Wesch video relayed key messages and decided to use a similar format to highlight its services.
The video has recently been updated to reflect changes to the Learning Resources services; it has also been given a ‘slicker' make-over than the original ‘Wesch-style' version.
The video is embedded on the opening right-hand frame of the Informs tutorial. At just over two and a half minutes in length it provides a concise but engaging introduction to Learning Resources services for students before they undertake the tutorial.
Image 1: Homepage of the Learning Resources Induction tutorial
Image 2: 'Online Resources' section of the Learning Resources Induction tutorial
Image 3: Selection of pages from the i-Guide
Anthony and Tricia both agree that the new-format ‘facilitated' inductions have been more effective for students than simply being left to it, and that these students were more likely to go back to use the tutorial again.
From the team's perspective, facilitating the sessions, but not having to lead the students through the whole process step by step, has been a great help, as typically:
The combination of video and tutorial caters for a range of students. Students who did not go through the full tutorial, or skimmed through it, still gathered key information about the Learning Resources services through the video. In contrast, however, the team also saw many postgraduate students taking the time to progress diligently through the tutorial from start to finish.
Students have still been provided with a printed guide called the ‘i-Guide', which contains the basic information included in the tutorials. Anthony deliberately chose to provide this, despite the cost savings they could have made by removing it, as some students do still prefer to read from a printed guide, rather than solely relying on on-screen information.
The only real issue for students has been that the College's VLE currently does not present itself in the right-hand frame of the tutorial, preferring to open over the top of the Informs frames, filling the screen. Other than this the frames, which are locked together, present the information/instructions and live resources successfully, improving greatly on previous inductions where students would regularly lose their places in the guide, or accidentally lose or close the web windows they were working in.
The Informs induction sessions have received very positive feedback from students.
However, Tricia acknowledges that the tutorial was put together at short notice (in far less time than the team would have ideally liked); she says they have learned a great deal from developing and delivering it, and know that there is plenty they need to do to improve it for the next inductions.
The next step is to make the tutorial less dense, with individual sections more concise and, therefore, easier to read. Tricia also plans to ‘chunk' the tutorial into a number of smaller individual tutorials, so that students will feel less over-faced, and will find it easier to find and access topics when going over them again. Left-hand frames will focus on presenting either information or an instruction to follow, but not both.
Making the tutorials concise and easy to read is the key bit of advice that Anthony and Tricia would offer to others who are thinking of producing similar online tutorials.
Tricia will also be developing audio voice-overs for the tutorials, which will be embedded into the tutorials and which students can opt to listen to.
“The audio will provide a different option for those who find too much text a problem, but it will also be a great help to anyone who is not able to have a facilitated session.” Tricia Haddock, Senior Learning Resources Officer
“The audio will provide a different option for those who find too much text a problem, but it will also be a great help to anyone who is not able to have a facilitated session.”
Tricia Haddock, Senior Learning Resources Officer
Anthony is confident about continued use of the online tutorial for inductions:
“We're already dealing less and less with cohorts of students and more with individual students working to individual start dates and timescales. The online tutorials will be key to inducting these students.” Anthony Beal, Learning Resources Section Leader
“We're already dealing less and less with cohorts of students and more with individual students working to individual start dates and timescales. The online tutorials will be key to inducting these students.”
Anthony Beal, Learning Resources Section Leader
It also now looks as though the use of Informs may be spreading wider than the Learning Resources team. One PGCE tutor has been so impressed with the induction tutorial that she plans to use Informs to create teaching resources, taking its use at the College out of the learning support information/instruction arena and into a teaching and learning context.
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