In this month's blog, I spoke to David Busby, Head of Digital & Academic Skills, about the variety of support they provide and how the teams use student and staff feedback to shape their services. I also heard about a newly launched Assessment Preparation Planner to help students prepare for all types of assessments.
Cassie: Hi David, firstly thanks so much for agreeing to speak to me today, I know how busy you and your teams are. Could you just introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your role and the teams you manage?
David: Hi Cassie. I'm Dave Busby and I’m the head of the Digital and Academic Skills (DAS) team. Our role in the university is to support all students with successful continuation and completion of their studies. This means helping them develop the transversal skills they need to succeed in their careers when they leave University. We provide support in person through workshops and 1:1 tutorials, and also online through self-access resources on academic study, digital, and workplace skills.
Cassie: That’s amazing, thanks. So the Skills team deliver a wide variety of opportunities for students to develop their skills. It sounds like these opportunities not only benefit their academic skills, but are transferable more widely?
David: That's absolutely right. We help students develop their professional skills. This covers everything from developing the confidence to talk about complex topics and arguments to non-expert audiences in an engaging and persuasive way, to managing time and workloads effectively, to having impact in meetings. We don’t just help with academic writing and preparing reports or managing projects, but we also help with public speaking, working collaboratively, and learning to listen and understand each other. You can read more about how we support students to get ahead and prepare for their future on our Skills webpages.
Cassie: In terms of how you and your teams shape the offer for students – how do they respond to student feedback? And also, the needs of academic departments where course delivery and requirements change?
David: We endeavour to collect feedback from every single interaction we have with students whether that's a feedback form after a workshop or tutorial, or through dedicated activities like the Digital Skills Focus Groups we just ran, where we asked students directly what they’d like to see from us to support their Digital Skills needs.
We are mindful to take on board all feedback and suggestions students give us, to ensure our provision is delivered in the best way and has the biggest positive impact on their development. The ethos of the DAS team is that we are a service for students, and we take a student-first approach to all our work. We also work very closely with our academic colleagues to make sure our provision is delivered at the right time and in line with any changes to the curriculum and assessment, or changes to technology and ways of working in the future.
Cassie: Do you have any examples where you have changed the offer from Skills in response to students or staff?
David: Yes, I have loads! A lot of DAS provision in the past was embedded into student programmes, so our teachers would pop up three or four times to deliver support on essay writing or structuring a paragraph for example. This way of delivery wasn’t flexible for students; it was delivered when it fit the schedule, rather than at the time it was actually needed by students. We recognised that we could be more multi-modal to accommodate diverse ways of developing skills, so we looked at all our provision and digitally transformed more than half of it into self-access learning resources. This means our provision is now available at point of need rather than point of delivery, and are interactive, fully accessible and flexible. The digital resources we developed were shared with academic colleagues to embed in their courses, so that students can access them as many times as they need in a self-paced and personalised way. The other benefit of this approach is that with more support and information available online 24/7, our teachers can make in-person provision more practical and activity-based. It also means we have more time to meet students for personalised 1:1 tutorials.
We’re really proud of the way everything we deliver can be personalised by students to fit their individual needs. For example, if a student wants feedback on writing but doesn’t have time to come to a 1:1 tutorial with one of our teachers, that’s fine. Instead, they can submit their writing to us and we’ll send them feedback via email. Students who are on placement or learning remotely can access our workshops online instead of in-person, and any student can mix and match the provision to suit them best. Attend some workshops in-person, join a tutorial online, access digital resources in the middle of the night… It’s all possible!
Another way we’ve responded to requests is our development of support for using generative AI and digital skills. We don’t tell students which tools they should be using, but we can help students consider things like bias or provenance in AI generated information, and how to approach these tools with a critical mindset. We encourage students to think beyond the Gen AI tool itself: what has the tool taught me, so that I can now work with agency and independence?
Cassie: Thanks. And in terms of students, and colleagues, navigating the offer from Skills, how do they go about this? Is it easy for them to find the opportunities they need?
David: All of our support is promoted through the University of Bath web pages and also, most importantly, everything we offer is available through MySkills. Our 1:1 and email tutorials, our self-access resources, our fantastic Skills for Success Writing Toolkit workshops, and our short courses such as the new public speaking course coming in October are all there.
I would say make sure you go to MySkills and look at the range of opportunities for development that are available. It’s certainly not all academic writing; there are resources on time management, note taking, responding to feedback, on top of everything we’ve already talked about. It’s just too much to list! I would encourage students to go to My Skills and take a personalised approach to finding what they need, whether that’s a tutorial, self-access resource or in-person workshop. And if there are colleagues looking for support for students in a particular area, please get in touch, we’re happy to discuss what you need. The best way to reach us is by email (academic-skills@bath.ac.uk).
Cassie: Brilliant, to wrap up, is there anything else you would like students or colleagues to be aware of from Skills? Or perhaps a call to action? I’m conscious S2 assessments are fast approaching so demand on your teams probably goes up.
David: I would say to all students and staff tell us what you want, and we will do our very best to make sure that we can deliver what you're asking for. With the upcoming assessment period, I would say be mindful of what you need and if you've got a worry or concern about your academic performance, or revision, or time management, don't hide it. Come and find out what resources we have available and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, tell us!
We’ve just launched our brand-new Assessment Preparation Planner, which puts together top tips in the form of videos, blogs, and digital resources to help students prepare for their assessments – and we don’t just mean exams. If you’re handing in coursework or working on your dissertation, this is for you too. All students will find something to help them in there, so if you do nothing else today, have a look at it. As with all our resources, the planner is available in MySkills, until 30 May.
Cassie: Thanks Dave, that has been so informative and hopefully given useful insight to colleagues and students to take away and use.
Contact me directly at pro-vc-se@bath.ac.uk to ask questions or suggest future topics you'd like to hear about on my blog.
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