Engaged Students
Student Team
The Library Student Team, with their dual role as Library staff and current students, are integral in everything we do; some of the statistics elsewhere in this report acknowledge this specifically, but in reality, the Student Team have contributed to development and delivery across all of our services. With 21 members, the Student Team continued to work effectively despite facing challenges as students themselves in 2020/21 and spent over 5,000 hours on tasks ranging from delivering workshops to content development for our social media accounts and student-facing blogs.
This ensured that our support for students featured voices that were able to relate to some of the challenges faced by students in this particular year. They also led the production of a podcast to accompany our University College for Interdisciplinary Leaning unit, Digital Society, in both semesters, ensuring that the taught unit featured a strong student voice, and provided a means for course participants to review the materials in a different way.
Most significantly, the Student Team led the development and delivery of the Library Peer Network, producing hundreds of open resources which have been viewed thousands of times, and offer personal support for students from widening participation backgrounds in a new online space.
Two Student Team members achieved HEA Fellowship this year, demonstrating their commitment to teaching and learning in higher education.
Virtual Teaching
When we were called upon to move our teaching online, the Library’s Teaching, Learning and Students Team were already prepared. It took a lot of work to ensure we could continue to offer our services to a high standard through the pandemic, and it has not been easy. But in these circumstances where accessibility, inclusivity and flexibility are paramount, we have been in our element.
In Semester 1, we launched our Virtual Teaching and Support approach, to ensure that we provide support which is accessible to all students. Through a Teams space, we planned, discussed, exchanged ideas and collaborated on the development of new support, and invited staff from across the Library and University to take part. This established a consistent, inclusive and flexible approach to the support we provided through our services, including a commitment to asynchronous-first delivery, ensuring that we do not exclude based on the time zone, technology, internet access or home situation of our learners – something of particular importance this year.
By Semester 2, we had established the importance of the Library’s commitment to, and understanding of the pedagogy behind online and hybrid teaching, leading to our inclusion in teaching initiatives across the University. This includes strong Library presence on committees and working groups looking at assessment, flexible learning, the digital learning environment and accessible and inclusive teaching.
Assessment Support
During the Winter and Easter exam periods, we offered Assessment Support through an improved and updated package, with an aim to provide students with strategies and advice to succeed in communicating what they have learnt, to showcase their understanding in their assessments.
We offered drop-ins, live sessions including Revising Together workshops and the popular Calm your Brain sessions delivered by the University’s Counselling Team, and we made physical spaces available to students. However, our focus this year was on providing the best and most flexible virtual support we could, to ensure that all students could benefit regardless of their situation.
We developed a My Learning Essentials Assessment Support resource, designed to be embedded in Blackboard and accessed asynchronously. This new resource brought together a number of blog posts, podcasts and interactive resources, providing them to students at the point of need. We also streamlined the request process to make it easier for academics to get this support in their programme/unit quickly.
Over the year, our Assessment Support resources were viewed 5,747 times with engagement during the winter campaign increasing by 111% compared to last year.
Get Started
Get Started is the annual Library campaign designed to introduce new and returning students to Library services. In September 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning was still the norm and any on-campus activities had to be run with social distancing measures in place. Given this, the Get Started 2020 campaign had to be adapted.
An offer of equivalent quality for distance learners has always been a priority for the Library and this proved invaluable when planning for Semester 1. Our starting assumption was that students would need to access our services remotely; either from home (wherever in the world that was) or from other areas of the University campus. But we would still have a large number of students who needed or wanted to access our services in person. We also recognised that we would have students who were new to the University and hadn’t had any in-person teaching for nine months alongside students who were returning to the University who remembered ‘how things used to be’.
Because the first semester was staggered with different student groups joining at different times, Get Started ran as a holistic and long-term learning and orientation programme which students could dip in and out of as they needed to, to access the services currently available.
Our Get Started and new ‘Welcome Back’ messaging had to be coordinated, accessible and remain consistent with the sector-leading standard it had always been, combining information on practical support, our wellbeing offer and knowledge of what an academic Library is.
Our Teaching and Learning team embedded in-depth ‘Welcome’ presentations and resources in Blackboard for students to work through in their own time.
The resources included:
- Video and podcast introductions from staff
- Content which would previously be delivered in a presentation
- Self-paced activities
- Community activities such as Padlet
The most popular pages across the Library website were:
Searching resources – 10,462 Unique views
Service availability – 10,317 Unique views
Study spaces booking – 9,424 Unique views
My Learning Essentials – 5,069 Unique views
Locations and opening hours – 3,870 Unique views
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