What is Develop Me?

Literature in retention and student engagement  has identified a strong need for institutions to manage the process of initial engagement more effectively (Tinto, 1993; Harvey and Drew, 2006; Yorke and Longden, 2007; Currant and Keenan, 2009). In response to increasing numbers of students approaching the Learner Development Unit at the University of Bradford to request help with their skills and with the process of understanding what university was all about, a new approach, known as Develop Me! was piloted in 2006. Over the last three years Develop Me! has grown considerably in response to feedback from staff and students.

Develop Me! currently consists of five different strands. These are:

1. A social network hosted in Ning. developme.ning.com.
2. SaPRA: our in-house Skills and Personal Development Activity. SaPRA focuses on helping students to identify their levels of confidence in different skill areas such as academic reading, academic writing, communication skills and so on. SaPRA utilises PebblePad. More information about SaPRA can be found on our website. www.brad.ac.uk/developme/sapra/
3. Online skills development resources. These provide 24/7 help and support to students who have identified that they need to develop a particular skill area. Students interact with the resources in a number of different ways for example as a result of a “1 to 1” intervention with an LDU adviser, after completing SaPRA or after attending an LDU workshop.
4. Mobile Guides. These provide students with information about the University in an easy to access format. We are currently pursuing the idea of creating an iPhone app that users can download onto their iPhones or iPod touches. This will be followed up with versions for windows based devices in the near future. www.braduni.mobi.
5. Research into the Student Experience. We have been actively researching the student experience at Bradford since 2005. This research has been fundamental to the implementation and refinement of the Develop Me! approach. Without regular feedback from the student body I would feel less confident that our approach was meeting the needs of students. However, because we have such an open dialogue with the student body I am confident that what we are doing is meeting their needs and doing so in a way that they want it to be done. Many Universities have developed social networks in the last few years, but I am especially proud of the way in which we have done this at Bradford as it’s been truly student led.

A Brief History

Develop Me! has grown out of a number of different externally funded projects which have all focused on increasing student engagement and providing the support learners need, at the time they want it and in a format they can access effectively.

These projects have included:

• Developing a model of the extended student from pre-entry to post graduation (funded by the HE Academy as part of their Pathfinder programme). This approach now forms the backbone of our student success strategy which has re-invented the student lifecycle model originally developed by HEFCE into 4 different lifecycles of applicant, transition, support and guidance and moving on.
• E-induction (funded by the HE Academy as part of their e-learning research observatory) where we aim to provide a seamless transition into University through joining together enrolment, induction and transition activities into one place.
• Integrated online support where we provide 24/7 support to students via our web based materials offering interactive re-useable learning objects for students to engage with when they need to.
• We have also tried to respond to diverse students by developing a digital typology, the SaPRA tool and engaging with other JISC projects such as LLiDA (Learning Literacies in a Digital Age).

The Social Network

Central to the Develop Me! approach has been the introduction of a social network for students and staff to engage in prior to arrival at university. Students are able to start the process of making friends through engaging with the social network and are able to share their hopes, fears and concerns about starting their course. They can also have their burning questions answered by responding to our expectations questionnaire before they arrive on campus. This helps to make them ‘feel at home’.

Example of posts:

“Hi all getting excited about starting uni, feels strange after not being in a school enviroments for syuch a looooong time [sic]. Hope to see you all soon”.

“Hi everyone! I'm starting the foundation degree in Community Regeneration & Development in 26 sleeps and starting to get nervous! Can't wait to meet everyone! I noticed that we are supposed to meet in the atrium on the 21st - anyone know what time?”

“Is everybody as shell shocked and tired as I am, gosh hope next week isn't so tiring”.

Why Create a Social Network?

I have used social forums and tools for interacting with people ever since I engaged with the internet as a student at University. This started off by using simple newsgroups to meet likeminded people. As the internet grew and as the use of newsgroups declined I started to use bulletin boards. Whilst pregnant I found an online community which enabled me to manage a significant life transition (becoming a mother) very effectively. I found a supportive community who were able to answer any questions I had, allowed me to develop friendships and supported me. I wanted to somehow replicate this amazing support network for new students when they arrived at University, and in particular to offer them the same opportunities to see that everyone else was feeling the same as them, that no one had all the answers and that they could make friends easily.

Our first attempts to establish an online community were relatively limited. In 2007 we installed Moodle and created a series of discussion forums for students to post queries and for other students and staff to support them. Students were able to self register on the Moodle site. However in order to see what posts had been made they needed to be logged in with an account. Even though this activity was fairly straightforward it appeared to have put a lot of people off and the engagement with the discussion forums was limited.

Reflecting on this, and also aware that with the explosion in the use social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook we identified Ning, a platform for creating your own social network, as a potentially suitable tool. We felt that using a much more prominent tool like Facebook was not something we were comfortable with because:

• I don't trust Facebook (this is a personal thing!) and don’t want to rely on it for an institutional social network as I have no control over the format, style or layout.
• Facebook has become increasingly unstable with posts going missing, being duplicated.
• Ning has much more flexibility in terms of being able to create an identity for a group rather than being tied in with the FaceBook format.
• It is easy to upload and share documents in Ning
• It is easier and more flexible to import 3rd party widgets into Ning than Facebook, and with Facebook you generally have to have had a Facebook app developed for this to happen; with Ning you don't.
• We had seen some issues emerge with limited moderation on Facebook groups in 2007.
• Some older students didn’t feel comfortable using Facebook as they saw that as the space their children engaged with. They wanted something for University and not trying to replicate what their children did.
• Facebook is my personal social networking space and I like to keep it separate from my 'work' spaces.
• We can use Google analytics more easily with Ning: this has helped us to see who is using the site and when.

The Ning space was initially supported by a colleague in our teaching quality enhancement group, who created the initial links on the site and imported some of the widgets. We also employed a student over the summer to upload lots of the events into the space. The site is now managed by the central University web team. It has over 2000 members as of December 2009 and is still growing. We are very pleased with how Ning as a tool works. The only changes we have made are to pay to remove adverts from the site. This costs approximately $20 per month.

Feedback

These are some quotes that we have received from students about interacting with Develop Me!:

“The forums are great as you can meet other people before beginning University. It makes you feel less nervous.”

“[I like] being able to meet and talk to people before starting”

“You’ve got his huge edifice which is a University, but what you need is a human face on it.”

“Thanks for the warm welcome note, it gave me a great first impression about the university of Bradford.”

Staff have also been very positive about Develop Me!:

“This [Develop Me!] is great. I am so pleased that you have set this up and it’s an easy way for me to talk to the new students and get to know them better” 

“They [students] did seem a lot more self reliant with getting themselves registered and getting going with things.”

“I thought I was too old to do all this [social networking] but it’s not as hard as you think and the students obviously seem to benefit from it”

The Future

So, what happens next? We have done a lot of work with Develop Me! over the last few years, but as with any idea it is constantly being refined and updated.

Our online community has been extremely successful and I am very pleased with the uptake for 2009. Many more staff led groups have been populated and encouraged. The site has remained busy well in to November this year, whereas previously it had died by early October. Our focus has now moved to producing mobile apps, using CampusM to help move our current braduni.mobi web content into downloadable apps for iPhones and Windows devices. We hope to launch these for the 2010/11 academic session.

In terms of broader contexts, the student experience has been identified as the most important aspect the university will focus on in the new corporate strategy from 2009-2014. This builds on the student success strategic assessment we submitted to HEFCE earlier this year as part of their monitoring of Widening Participation work. We’re now focusing on embedding the activities identified to enhance the student experience. Our current U-SED project (student experience video diaries) is helping to provide a crucial insight into the student experience which is feeding up to high level policy making. The future is exciting!

Becka Currant
Dean of Students
University of Bradford
r.currant@Bradford.ac.uk

Links

Develop Me!: http://developme.ning.com/
Ning: http://www.ning.com/