I'm Dr Eve Giraud and I teach on the Undergraduate International Media and Communications Degree
within the Department of Culture, Film and Media. Last year, for the first time, we decided
to roll out a study skills programme on the International Media and Communications degree,
and the course is essentially, the module is essentially, a two hour session, every
single week. And it is credit bearing, 20 credits in the year overall, which means essentially
10 credits per term because it's a kind of year-long module that students do.
And the aim of the module, where it really came from, was that we'd noticed that we spent
quite a lot of time in the first year helping students get their essay writing, get their
research skills, to the necessary standards and the necessary quality to do really well
in the second and third year. And we were having to spend time in other modules working
on those types of skills. And what we felt was that if we dedicated a particular module
to study skills then that would kind of enhance the degree programme as a whole and allow
them to go straight into second year with the confidence to do really well at academic
work from the off. We also felt that we had a very international
degree programme and it was really important to have a space where students could get to
know each other without the pressure of content-led modules, and that this could help aid integration
on such an international degree programme. How it was organised was in the first term
we focussed on developing student's basic research, writing and other skills, which
included presentation skills and exam-type skills. And what was important, I think, about
the way we approached these topics in the first term was that even though they sound
like quite generic academic skills, we really worked to make sure they were absolutely integral,
they were very much linked in with the type of content we were doing within our degree
programme. So, for instance, we have a particular session
on Library Skills where I physically took the whole class to the library and got them
to find certain texts that were directly relevant to their core first year modules. And in doing
this it a) made students much more confident about using the resources here at Nottingham,
but b) it showed them how to find exactly the type of texts they'd need for this particular
degree programme. And I did a similar session in a computer lab with electronic resources.
So basically everything on the course was directly tailored to fit within our degree
programme and to enhance our existing content. And this really helped the students to see
exactly how their skills could be directly applied to the degree.
The other project that we did, which was in the second term, was a more group-oriented
project. And essentially at the start of term I split the students up into small study groups
and their task the whole term was to develop a particular publication, which they kind
of put together themselves as a group, developed the content for as a group, designed within
their groups, and the publication was 'A Guide for Nottingham University Students'. And they
had to put together these guides, and they had to have an opening section that explained
to students how best to approach study. So in a sense that was them reprocessing some
of the skills they'd learnt in the first term and explaining to prospective other students
exactly how to apply those skills. So that really helped students, I think, get it much
clearer in their own heads how to approach academic work.
And I can show you a couple of examples of them now, just to give you a sense of the
sort of good work the students produced. So this is an example of a particular project
by students, which I thought entailed an incredible amount of effort and that I was really pleased
with, and as you can see it's 'The University of Nottingham Guide for Dummies'. But what
was particularly helpful about this guide was, as well as being incredibly comprehensive
and containing almost every piece of information that you'd need to know about being a new
student, and particularly about this degree programme, is that they did the whole thing
through the lens of a character. So this is "Simon the Fresher" and what's very useful
is that Simon is an international student. So throughout the pamphlet you get useful
advice about what you might need to do when you're an international student.
This is another project. Also we were very pleased with the level of creativity here,
but what I particularly liked about this project was it was very detailed in explaining exactly
how to approach academic tasks. So you can see here they've step-by-step explained how
to approach essay writing, and they make points such as, you know, you can lose a lot of marks
if you don't include bibliographies, etc., and they've also done the same thing for other
types of academic work, such as presentations. This is a slightly more formal piece of work.
One of the things I particularly liked about this was that it contains a very, kind of,
personal section talking about, kind of, anxiety when you first start university. And he just
explains how he eventually plucked up the courage and went and spoke to a member of
staff about his issues, and felt that, you know, he was really supported and really helped
and that's something we want to really, kind of, copy and distribute to new students, as
we felt that it was really helpful advice a) to know that a lot of people go through
feeling a bit, kind of, bewildered, a bit overwhelmed, when they first start university
and that it's ok to feel like that. But also that there are ways I suppose of overcoming
those difficulties. Because we've had very good feedback from
the students we've decided to increase the hours of study skills to three hours a week
for next term, and hopefully that should allow students more of a chance to develop more
of their project work in the study skills sessions themselves. We're also considering,
and it looks likely that we're going to roll it out to both the degrees that we offer,
so rather than just having it for the International Media and Communications degree, I think people
are quite keen to have an equivalent study skills module for Film and Television students.
In written work I can't tell you how much of an improvement there was. But I think the
thing that I really noticed was the confidence at which students
went beyond their reading lists and, kind of, did some independent research for their
essays, which for me was something quite kind of unusual for first year work. Because we
teach Media for several core first year modules it's really important that they don't just
rely on, you know, text books, because obviously things are changing quite rapidly within the
media. So they need to, kind of, use electronic resources such as journals, to get the most
up to date information. And because we showed them how to use those types of resources quite
early on, this kind of then fed back into the essays, and so we had, you know, quite
sort of substantial pieces of academic work that were very researched by the end of the
year. Which I was, you know, incredibly pleased about. And I'm really confident about this
year group, now they're going into their second year, that they'll continue on that path and
continue to support each other. They know exactly how to go into the second year and
to, kind of, continue producing this kind of good quality work. In a nutshell, I suppose,
it just really helped them perform very strongly as a year group overall.