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Case study: Using Ultra to overcome teaching and learning challenges in a first semester history module

Department of History
Jon Howlett

Jon Howlett gives an overview of how he developed the Ultra site for the new ‘Arguments and Analysis’ module in the Department of History. He focuses on three key challenges that shaped the approaches taken:

  • Supporting a diverse student cohort

  • Integrating academic skills

  • Supporting new teaching staff

Watch their presentation:

Using Ultra to overcome teaching and learning challenges in a first semester history module (Panopto viewer) (11 mins 43 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hello. I'm John Howlett from the Department of History. I've been invited to talk to you today about how my colleagues and I use Ultra to overcome teaching and learning challenges. And in the design of a new first semester History module, Arguments and Analysis.

Arguments and Analysis is a course for incoming Stage one students, and it ran for the first time in our new semesterised program in 2023-24. And when we designed this program, the team had three goals. The first was to introduce students to the history of history as an evolving discipline. The second was to get them to think about themselves as historians and engage critically with different approaches to the past. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, to induct students into our policies and practices, including teaching core skills, all the things they'll need to succeed at university imparting key information about the degree, so, for example, how to understand the department's marking criteria and our expectations of them as students. And finally, to encourage proactive and reflective learning through reinforcing the idea of the feedback cycle, so students take responsibility for their own education here at York.

When we were designing this module, we encountered three key challenges. For the rest of the presentation, I'm going to talk to you about how we used Ultra to address those challenges in module design. The first was recognising and adapting to student learning requirements in 2023. The second was teaching skills without becoming a skills module. And the third was how to induct and assist new teaching staff in the department.

The first of those challenges was to recognise and adapt to student learning requirements. Across the sector, the number of students studying history has increased exponentially in the last 10 or 20 years. We also have students coming from a much, much wider range of educational and societal backgrounds, meaning that the way that we teach our students has to change and adapt to reflect these realities. Given the financial commitments of studying at university, students rightly have high expectations about the level of teaching provision they can expect. As well as this. This generation of students had their school education severely disrupted by COVID 19. And that's just one of a number of increasing, sorry intersecting, issues impacting negatively on young people's mental health. So we thought that we needed to factor each of these issues into our design of this new course because it comes at a crucial stage in the students' study. So ways we tried to do that meant ensuring clarity and consistency in all the essential information we give them in our teaching materials, conveying a sense of certainty so students could gain confidence by knowing where they stand and also explain the rationale behind each part of the course, from the teaching to the assessment. So students know how the course will benefit them. Finally, we want to have a high standard presentation to convey professionalism, quality. Give an example of this, when students are undertaking their weekly work on the module, we break that down by clear sections so they know what to expect when they go to their first lecture, their second lecture, how to prepare for their seminar, and also has to engage with the weekly skills chalenges which I'll introduce later. As you can see, when students begin preparing for their seminars they have a detailed overview that links the seminars to the lectures, tells them what to read and how to read it, gives essential contextual information where needed. It tries to make everything as clear and easy to follow as possible.

Secondly, we found that in our department, teaching academic skills is a really essential part of our work. It allows students to successfully transition from school to University. It helps them to understand what's expected of them when they arrive at university and how to produce high quality academic work. However, we found that a student desire to focus more on skills and to have that sense of what they should be doing and how they should be doing it doesn't always equate to enjoyment of skills focused modules which traditionally in our department have been rather unpopular. So the challenge was how to integrate skills into a course which was already rich in engaging historical content, essentially so that students can learn skills as they become historians. The way that we incorporated this into the module using Ultra was to set up asynchronous skills challenges. So these skills challenges are set up every week in the lectures and introduced by our lecturing team. Further details and how to engage with the activity follow on the VLE and they prepare their skills challenges in time for their seminars where the skills they've learnt can be consolidated through discussion with peers and with seminar teaching staff. We try to be very careful with the skills challenges to design them so that they are aligned to student development needs. So for example, in week five of our semester, students write their first procedural essays. So our essay planning challenge had to come before that point. We're trying to equip the students with the skills they need before they have to use them. We try to encourage active rather than passive learning, so rather than lecturing to the students about how to reference, We set them referencing exercises and challenges. Rather than reading about the grade descriptors or being lectured about them, we ask them to mark sample essays, then write reflections on those marks which they then receive feedback on. The key part of this is signposting. So students don't just undertake these tasks, they know where to find guidance and resources so they can refer back to them throughout their time at York. We are also are very keen, as I said earlier, to give students a sense of themselves as learners and people learning a new discipline. So we promote reflexive learning, for example, in challenges on contributing to seminars and the principles of effective group work. We want students not just to think about what they're doing, but why they're doing it and how that relates to their overall educational development. To give an example of this and how it's integrated into our VLE, this is an example of the overview that the students get of what the skills challenges are and why they do them. It's very important to us, as I explained earlier, that we tell students why each activity benefits them. And also having a high degree of clarity about how it works week on week. Here's an example of a skills challenge. A week 2 skills Challenge on reading and note taking, which students do as they prepare for their first seminar. You can see that the Skills Challenge has both links out to library guides on critical reading and note taking, and the library skills guides more widely, but also directed advice on how to complete the challenge itself and how that will be consolidated in that seminar.

Finally, when designing this new module, we were aware that a large number, six out of nine of the module staff were new starters at York. We were also aware of the fact that because of where it falls in our degree, new staff joining the department are likely to be assigned to this module in future. As we all know, when you start a new job, it's an incredibly pressured moment in anybody's career. There's a lot to to balance and also a lot of new information coming from everywhere. So we wanted to make sure that people were taking this course in their first term as a member the teaching staff at York would have as easy a time as possible, and to understand the logic and the rationale behind the module, why it's taught the way that it is, and also to induct them into the way that teaching happens across the department more widely. For the... in terms of the module... this also helps us to ensure clarity and consistency across the module, and it allows us to share best practice with colleagues, both new and old. An example of this is in the Guide for Staff which we've created as part of the module site. The idea behind this is that everything that new colleagues and existing colleagues need to know about the module is in one place, not, as is often the case, dispersed across various email chains. We wanted staff to be able to to know where to turn when they needed key information about the module. We also, as I've emphasised a number of times, we wanted to explain the pedagogic aims of the module and the rationale behind its design, including where it fits in our degree, and what else students are doing at the same time. By doing this, we also hoped to extend the life of the module because we are articulating why things are the way they are, and hopefully staff teaching on this module in future years will find it useful, and we won't need to reinvent things. As well as the rationale behind the module, we also introduce staff to assessment and feedback. We provide a walkthrough starting with the principles underlying the assessments and then moving to a week by week timeline. We provide performance form feedback points during the module and other useful resources that will save staff time. An example of this is in our staff guide to the skills challenges where we lay out, as I just did in this presentation, why this is a necessary activity, what it helps why it helps students at this stage in their career, and how to manage the challenges week on week. So for some of our challenges, staff have the answers in advance of the seminars, that's why we put those kind of things. As well as this, we wanted to help new staff in that process of adjusting to a new workplace, and hopefully give them slightly less work to do by producing a guide to teaching seminars. And also providing example seminar plans for each week so that we don't have nine members of staff essentially replicating the same work. So the first part of this section talks about priorities of the module and our module aims, and also History's seminar culture more widely. We then have a section that aims to secure clarity and consistency across the module. We give a rough outline of how seminars might run. And finally, we have the dedicated seminar plans for each teaching session - staff aren't obliged to use those plans, But they're there as a resource if people wish to use them.

So, in the presentation today, I've talked about some of these three big challenges that we face as a design team. Each challenging encountered in module design has been addressed with what we think are practical and workable solutions in Ultra at the design phase. This is obviously an ongoing process. So we're awaiting feedback from staff and students on how this how well this has worked in 2023. Thank you very much for watching this video.