Innovation in How We Teach at LSBU

Alex Denley, Director of Innovation & Transformation, London South Bank University

Alex Denley, Director of Innovation & Transformation, London South Bank University

Digital delivery tools in higher education, from Microsoft Teams to the recording/publishing of lectures (lecture capture), raise an important question for universities - does one teaching delivery method offer benefits to students over another and what’s their impact on student engagement?

For London South Bank University (LSBU), the start of semester one in 2022 has been quite like no other as we welcomed back our students and delivered first-class blended learning, at scale, to help our students learn the skills they need to build successful careers. Much of that is being done thanks to our new study spaces which have the latest technology, like LSBU Hub which was opened last month and has state-of-the-art teaching and lecture spaces, a library, gym, and sports facilities.

LSBU has three campuses in Southwark, Havering, and Croydon, where we opened the first-ever university campus in the area in 2021 to teach health and business courses to help the NHS tackle a severe shortage of nurses across South London and the Gatwick triangle. With a combination of both digital and physical teaching practices, students are being educated in a truly hybrid fashion with both face-to-face presence and digital technologies. Whilst the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic taught us that we can absolutely adapt traditional conventional means of delivery to accommodate either fully online sessions or in-classroom experience, never has this been done multipurpose, nor is it quite as mainstream in universities as today.

Given this is a new approach and is delivered at scale; there is a lack of historic data and insight for comparative analysis. So, we are now learning from the new ways of working, capturing what is going on, and utilising this to improve the overall student experience.

Student retention is a key strategic priority for LSBU, and ambitious targets have been set around improving the number of students who progress and ultimately continue in their studies. Rather than one silver bullet providing the solution to improved progression, they require a range of interventions, all of which must be underpinned by the provision of accurate and timely data. The degree to which individual students are actively present and participating in all areas of study is vital information that, when put directly into the hands of academics and student support staff, will allow for timely and highly targeted interventions, as well as supporting compliance.

Capturing data and interaction analytics from sources including attendance management, virtual learning environments, and library management systems can be used to solve two important objectives for every university, ‘identifying students at risk of withdrawal’ and ‘identifying students at risk of underperforming’. A predefined percentage calculation can be applied to the data that has been gathered and measured against individual key performance indicators set by LSBU’s eight schools. This will allow a top-level Student Engagement score to be set per student cohort, right down to the individual level. This means academics can be notified and interact in a timely and relevant manner to remedy potential negative outcomes and help drive meaningful one-to-one conversations between tutor and student. It will also help solve the question of whether face-to-face learning is more impactful and beneficial than remote learning, or does it vary depending on the nature of the course studied.  

By carefully undertaking a comparison of how students across a year group engage and learn, LSBU is looking to have use of the information collected by January 2023, allowing them to see where the shift in teaching delivery has benefitted our students.

The extraction and use of rich data from our technology and records of how we interact with our students will help steer investment to improve student operations by helping identify the best learning practices. In time, there is more data being captured and assessed against graduate outcomes, which can be used to support course and campus structure improvements when designing how and what we teach. Levels of automation can be applied to start delivering a level of predictiveness and helping LSBU hit our big strategic targets for student success and being fit for the future.

Microsoft

Sports