Our Work Based Learning Students' Experience

Join the University of Chester's Academic Skills Team for The Skills Pod. In this episode, Academic Skills Adviser's, Emma and Anthony, chat to the team's work based learning students, Elly and Lucy. We discuss the project they have been working on, their experience of working with the Academic Skills Team, what they have learnt during their placement, and what skills they are going to take forward in their academic studies.  

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Transcript

Speaker 1 (Emma): Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of the Skills Pod. I'm Emma, and I'm one of the academic skills advisors at the University of Chester, and I'm joined by my colleague.

Speaker 2 (Tony): Hi everyone, my name's Tony, and I'm one of the senior academic skills advisors and project developers as part of the academic skills team. Today, we are going to be chatting to our work-based learning students all about their 2025 project within the academic skills team.

Speaker 3 (Ellie): Hello. My name is Ellie, and I'm currently studying psychology with criminology, second year.

Speaker 4 (Lucy): My name's Lucy, I'm studying psychology in second year as well. 

Speaker 1 (Emma): Tony, do you want to tell us about the work-based learning project?

Speaker 2 (Tony): Yeah, so it's been a privilege to have both Ellie and Lucy as part of the team for the past four weeks. It's the fourth and final week, unfortunately. We're quite fortunate to have both Ellie and Lucy as part of the team. Basically, the work-based learning project is a two-part project. One was to look at our social media platforms, such as our X and our Instagram, to see our reach, what we need to do differently, and how to get more engagement – what the students want to see from an institutionalized account.

The other big one was part of the Skills Pod. As we are now award-winning (nice plug!), we wanted to see – we have a lot of data through the systems that we use to publish our podcasts – but we don't really have the nuances of our students in terms of the breakdown of different levels and courses. Are they taking away that information as part of their course? Are they enhancing their learning? Really, once we got that award, it was, "Okay, now we need to push on and make it even better than it ever has been."

It's been a two-part project, and this all feeds in. Everything that Ellie and Lucy have done is feeding into a bigger project that both myself and Emma are working on, about writing up the Skills Pod. We're going to do some interviews with staff as well to write that up as a paper. But yeah, it's been really, really good to have both of them here. So, Ellie, Lucy, over to you. Why did you decide to come onto this project?

Speaker 3 (Ellie): I just think it looked like a really good opportunity for a psychology student because we do a lot of research. That was kind of what I saw in the job description on the placement board. With the survey that we did, it's like survey design and going up to people and asking them to fill it out. We've done stuff like that with our assessments, and I just thought it was a good opportunity to experience that in a work-based environment.

Speaker 4 (Lucy): Mine was basically the same, especially with picking dissertations and doing that next year. This placement has taught me how to do a survey and also how to do a lit review. With what I want to do with my dissertation, it's going to go one way or both ways. So then it's given me a bit more knowledge and understanding of how to effectively use them and get information from them.

Speaker 1 (Emma): Classic lit review. You're in a good position now. So, what did you find most beneficial about setting up the survey?

Speaker 4 (Lucy): What I think was most beneficial with the survey, like Ellie said, is with our dissertations, because we use JISC, we'll know how to set that up now if we choose to do that in our dissertations.

Speaker 3 (Ellie): Yeah, and then another thing was actually going up to people and asking them to do the survey. That was quite a scary thought, but then with the help of other people like Michaela, she did it first, and then me and Lucy were able to feel confident enough to go up to people and ask them to do it.

Speaker 2 (Tony): I'm very interested, Ellie and Lucy, with the survey design and creation, did you feel like it was more involved than you initially thought? Because I know some students think you just put a couple of questions together, but it's a little bit more involved than that, isn't it?

Speaker 3 (Ellie): Yeah, I knew there were like different ways someone could answer a question, but I didn't realize how many there were, especially when it's a question where you need to think if a person has more than one response, what kind of format we need to give them to express that, which I didn't really think about beforehand.

Speaker 1 (Emma): And I guess that kind of ties in with my next question, which is what were the challenges of creating or putting together the survey?

Speaker 4 (Lucy): I think I knew there was a lot of coding behind it, but I didn't know there were that many options within the coding thing that you do to set up the questions. I think it's quite confusing if you don't have someone there to support you with it. So, as Ellie said before, that will be useful if we're using that in our dissertations. And then also the words of the question; we changed a few of them to be more open questions rather than the only response being yes or no.

Speaker 1 (Emma): I guess that's the really difficult thing about creating a survey, isn't it? You have to think of what you want to get from the data, but also – this is probably a really obvious thing – you have to think about yourself as somebody who might be filling in that survey to think about how different wording of a question could potentially elicit different responses.

Speaker 2 (Tony): Yeah. And also maybe not be clear to somebody, so they might not respond in the "right way," in inverted commas.

Speaker 1 (Emma): Yeah.

Speaker 2 (Tony): And that's why it's been great, I think, to have both of you on, because, you know, we're not students anymore. I know that you both changed some of the questions to say, "Actually, a student wouldn't necessarily know..." We were talking about "home students," and that was one of the answers. And maybe you both were saying, "Well, but does that mean that they live at home or does that mean...?" It wasn't particularly clear, whereas we know from staff what we mean. But having that kind of audience feedback, I think, is vital in any kind of survey project. So yeah, it's been really, really useful. What were the key things that you found from the survey?

Speaker 3 (Ellie): We kind of found that a lot of people haven't heard about the pod or they weren't aware of the social media either, and that the promotion for that needs to be pushed more, I think.

Speaker 4 (Lucy): Yeah, we also found that different cohorts of students are more likely to not only know about the pod but also actively listen to it. So I think it was the arts department where it hadn't really been pushed. From the survey, we found out that they didn't listen to it or know about it.

Speaker 3 (Ellie): Yeah, and health and medicine departments were more likely to have heard of it and listened to it, as well as level fours, who didn't hear about it and they didn't listen to it. Level five, six, and seven were more likely to listen to it as well.

Speaker 1 (Emma): That's good. I'm glad that Health, Medicine, and Society are listening to it because I talk about it to them all the time, so they cannot escape the podcast.

Speaker 2 (Tony): Well, actually, what was interesting, one of the stats from it was that those people in Health, Medicine, and Society were still more likely to say they heard from it because of an academic skills session. So yeah, so you're doing a good job, Emma. Keep it up. But yeah, so we found a lot of stuff from the survey that we're going to put forward. And you both have the joys of coming into a team meeting in the next couple of days to present your findings of the project. All those things we're going to be taking forward. And, you know, people who are listening, just know that your views from taking part in that survey are directly influencing your student voice, directly impacting what we do as a team, and your voice is absolutely valued. So Ellie and Lucy, what key things are you going to take away from your time working in the academic skills team that are going to be useful in your final year?

Speaker 4 (Lucy): I think one thing I'm definitely going to take away is doing the lit review and finding these different papers that some say the same thing, some don't, then also applying that to what we found to see if there is a trend in the patterns. So for my dissertation, I think I will end up doing an analysis of papers, so then that will really aid me with that.

Speaker 3 (Ellie): Me too. I think that's quite similar to what I was going to say, but also that the academic skills team aren't scary people and I can go to them for help with my essays. Also, the survey thing as well, if I'm going to use that in my final year, that'll be really helpful with how to set up the questions and the wording and everything.

Speaker 1 (Emma): I think that's the key takeaway, isn't it? The academic skills team are not scary.

Speaker 2 (Tony): Yeah, and we've not paid them to say this, everybody. That's genuinely natural. We've not edited this so it sounds like we are nice people. We genuinely are, and we genuinely want to support students and have people use our service. So, yeah, please do come and use us in your final year. And Ellie and Lucy, with that, what were, genuinely, what were your expectations of the team before you joined? And did it match up? Was it different? Just intrigued.

Speaker 3 (Ellie): I just thought it's not what I expected.

Speaker 4 (Lucy): Same. I just thought everyone would be really strict and like, head on, they're doing their job, they're not laughing. But then one of the first questions when we came in was, "How do we have our toast?" So yeah, I think it's going to be fine.

Speaker 1 (Emma): And that's at the time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (Tony): Yeah, we are. I think what makes our team quite good, to say to those who've been in and around us and had one-to-ones, is we've all come from very different backgrounds. And I think that shows. We're not always super strict. We're here to support, and we are friendly. I think it's like what I said about the podcast before, it's human beings talking to other human beings, sharing their experiences. And that's kind of the crux of our team. I think we all respect each other, we all care about each other, and we all care about the students. We want people to use us wherever they are in their academic journey. We want people to know that we're approachable and friendly and that we're not judgy. We just want people to succeed.

Speaker 1 (Emma): Yeah.

Speaker 2 (Tony): And, you know, it's important to be fun because it's a tough job. We see so many students. At one point a couple of weeks ago around Easter, we had like 30 feed-forwards in a day. Everyone had multiple one-to-ones in a day and several hours in the day to get through everything. You've got to have that kind of resilience and humor. I think I talk on behalf of the entire team when I say both of you just fit in as if you've always been here. I think I said to you both, "You are our type of weird," and that's the best compliment I can give you both. So yeah, it's been a pleasure to manage you both. You don't even need managing, to be fair. You kind of came in and after week one, it was, "Yeah, this is what we're doing." And you kind of took the project forward, which I think is brave, to come into that setting and say, "This is kind of the direction we want to take this in," and to see it through. You've both been incredibly efficient. So yeah, it's been really, really good. There are lots of things in the summer; this feeds into that bigger project. So hopefully Ellie and Lucy are part of the paper write-up as well, which I think is really important, to see all that hard work as part of an academic paper. And yeah, we look forward to seeing your dissertations in the new year.

Speaker 1 (Emma): Thank you for listening to this episode of Skills Pod. I'm Emma.

Speaker 2 (Tony): And I'm Tony.

Speaker 3 (Ellie): And I'm Ellie.

Speaker 4 (Lucy): I'm Lucy.

All: Bye. Bye for now. Bye.