Month: February 2020

This session took place using the Collaborate Ultra online classroom software that we use on MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise and was a fascinating session for 2 reasons.

• Firstly, the students must have been exhausted having just had just had 2 hours of online lectures. 
• Secondly the Hong Kong students are historically more reserved and less willing to volunteer their thoughts unless asked directly. 

From a group of around 30 students, around 50% contributed to the online session and there was a real senses of empowerment in what we were discussing.

During our 45 minutes we identified 2 key topics that students felt particularly passionate about. These were:

• A cross cohort peer to peer communication platform
• Work experience opportunities

The actions that came from this were:

Margaret and Charfi set up the ‘Global’ WhatsApp group which is proposed to be the main forum to share cross cohort information. This would be in addition to the ‘local’ cohort specific WhatsApp channels that are already in existence. Although the London cohort have proposed Facebook as the key cross cohort information sharing platform, Facebook is not used by any of the current Hong Kong students. I have now emailed the London group and asked if anyone would be happy to take on the roll of the London group WhatsApp administrator.

Katherine initially proposed the idea of work experience opportunities and I set up a Google doc which I have shared with her. The purpose of this is to define how we could tap into our personal networks to help create a number of work experience opportunities within the arts and cultural sector.

Link to Transcript [Google doc] – This is a very interesting document which breaks the student suggestions into 3 categories. My contribution is not evident as I was talking and the students opted to use the chat feature rather than use their microphones. Even as an exercise this was great practice for the students who engaged with this activity with real enthusiasm

I still didn’t have my research question but had this window of opportunity of a thirty minute slot  with the London Unit 1 students during their very first face to face weekend (our course is a January start). As I thought about the session it became obvious that I needed to ask them about their thoughts and not just tell them about mine, not to complain of missed opportunities but to look at future possibilities. The slide above was on screen the whole time and was really a question focuses on what we could do as a community rather than what should they expect from the course.

I explained to the students that I am on the PG Cert and that this was part of my own research. This all felt very relevant to them as the whole weekend had been spent on discussing the importance of research and ways to approach it. They were happy to be recorded (audio) so that I could go through and make additional notes. 

Students were very interested in connecting with the HK cohort and had already planned to attend a face to face session in Hong Kong and a motivational factor for one London students to take the course was that her parents had previously lived in HK.

Actions:

The London students had already created a very active WhatsApp group. In addition to this, it was proposed that a Facebook group as well as an Instagram group could be set up and the Hong Kong students invited to join

Concerns:

Collaboration should be built into the course and be core curricula rather than extra curricula. We discussed examples where this was already established (such as unit 3). In addition I discussed the Online Intervention (Unit 7) which counts towards the students’ final grade. I used the ‘Tic Tok project’ from last year as an example of cross cohort team work.