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.