Supporting law students’ skills development online – a strategy to improve skills and reduce student stress?

Law students internationally suffer from a high level of psychological distress compared with the general and student populations, and anecdotal evidence suggests that students developing skills without adequate support experience significant stress and anxiety. This article considers an initiative at one Australian law school to develop a degree-wide structured online skills development programme as a means to both improve student skills acquisition and reduce student stress. The project implements, through the use of learning technology, the principles proposed by McKinney for making small changes to law school teaching, informed by self-efficacy theory, which can have powerful results.

Fostering postgraduate student engagement: online resources supporting self-directed learning in a diverse cohort

The research question for this study was: ‘Can the provision of online resources help to engage and motivate students to become self-directed learners?’ This study presents the results of an action research project to answer this question for a postgraduate module at a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom. The analysis of results from the study was conducted dividing the students according to their programme degree – Masters or PhD – and according to their language skills. The study indicated that the online resources embedded in the module were consistently used, and that the measures put in place to support self-directed learning (SDL) were both perceived and valued by the students, irrespective of their programme or native language. Nevertheless, a difference was observed in how students viewed SDL: doctoral students seemed to prefer the approach and were more receptive to it than students pursuing their Masters degree. Some students reported that the SDL activity helped them to achieve more independence than did traditional approaches to teaching. Students who engaged with the online resources were rewarded with higher marks and claimed that they were all the more motivated within the module. Despite the different learning experiences of the diverse cohort, the study found that the blended nature of the course and its resources in support of SDL created a learning environment which positively affected student learning.

Nurturing global collaboration and networked learning in higher education

We consider the principles of communities of practice (CoP) and networked learning in higher education, illustrated with a case study. iCollab has grown from an international community of practice connecting students and lecturers in seven modules across seven higher education institutions in six countries, to a global network supporting the exploration and evaluation of mobile web tools to engage in participatory curriculum development and supporting students in developing international collaboration and cooperation skills. This article explores the interplay of collaboration and cooperation, CoP and networked learning; describes how this interplay has operated in iCollab; and highlights opportunities and challenges of learning, teaching and interacting with students in networked publics in higher education.

Blended Learning Essentials Project reports

Blended Learning Essentials is a free suite of online courses for the Vocational Education and Training sector to promote effective practice and pedagogy in blended learning. The courses were run and supported from 2016 onwards by a consortium of partners funded by Ufi Charitable Trust. The lead partners were the University of Leeds, the UCL Institute of Education, the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), and FutureLearn. The Blended Learning Essentials (BLE) courses are for anyone working in further education, skills training, vocational education, workplace learning, lifelong learning or adult education, who wants to learn about and implement blended learning. The project reports cover engagement and marketing work undertaken during this project phase to reach the courses’ key audiences and work undertaken during this project phase to develop and promote the pathways to accreditation available to course participants. These reports are shared by ALT as a project partner on behalf of the BLE Project under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. �