PROFESSIONAL LEARNING AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT IN THE SCIENCES.

Sustaining engagement - helping students celebrate their remarkable selves

Griffith University is located across 6 campuses in South East Queensland, Australia, and is ranked in the top 2% of universities worldwide. Griffith “believe in, strive for and celebrate the Remarkable” – and we can certainly attest that their PebblePad implementation has been quite remarkable indeed, reaching an uptake of 30,000 licenses in their first 3 years of adoption and with continued sustained usage across the entire institution ever since. For this project, PebblePad has been employed to support an employability initiative that is open to all students in any degree under the university's Science Academic Group.

The 'Know who is doing what, where and when' Ambition 

Managing an employability initiative that is open to all students in degrees under the university's Science Academic Group is not an easy task. There are additional complexities associated with maintaining engagement in a non-compulsory co-curricular program that can be accessed by students at any point in their degree, and is partly self-directed. Challenges included:

• needing to track student attendance at workshops and progress through the program

• provide the means for students to engage in active and ongoing reflection to consolidate their learning

• an ability to easily identify students who complete each milestone and provide personalised feedback experience.

PebblePad is a learning portfolio - it allows us to deliver all of the learning and have them capture their initial thoughts about their professional development, allowing them to create a rich collection of their work to evidence their employability.  

GAYLE BRENT, LEARNING AND TEACHING CONSULTANT AND COORDINATOR OF THE SCIENCE PLUS PROGRAM

The Successful Workflow

The Science PLUS program (Professional Learning for University Students) was designed as an intensive workshop-based program with self-directed activities following the workshops. The program includes three levels of achievement - Bronze, Silver and Gold, with students receiving feedback at each milestone before progressing to the next level. Key features of the program are that it is presented in 'bite-sized' elements - which students can work on around their other study priorities - it is designed to be easy to navigate, and is action-based.

Building all of the post-workshop activities into a PebblePad Workbook has created a 'one-stop shop' for students to access materials (including the recording of the workshops for subsequent review), reflect on their activities and plan for further action, receive feedback, and build a final portfolio. The workbook design includes an overview page that facilitates reporting in order to quickly identify student progress. Workbook sections corresponding to each workshop can be 'invisible' to students until the workshop has been held, at which time the subsequent pages are released. This keeps the students focussed and on track and avoids overwhelming them with information and tasks. Reporting via PebblePad's assessment engine, ATLAS, enables at-a-glance oversight over student progress in order to provide feedback, award milestone rewards, or provide a motivational prompt to maintain engagement.

The video above, while not directly related to this case study, provides other examples of how PebblePadPebblePad can support learner engagement with learning activities across - and beyond - the curriculum.