Our Journey: a tool to support reflection and wellbeing Kate Lister

Overview Introducing Our Journey Background and rationale Design process Use cases

Our Journey is an accessible and engaging structure to represent journeys from the student perspective. Pick a card and think back to a moment in your student journey that it can represent Pick a corresponding emoji and reflect for a moment. What did you learn/take from that point in your journey?

Background and Rationale

Why do we want to understand and represent student journeys? Participatory research exercise with our Disabled Students Group identified areas that students wanted to see researched, including: Impacts of time spent on administrative processes (declaring a disability, applications for support). How flexibility in study can benefit students Diversity of students and their experiences is not visible Limited mechanisms to feed everyday issues like this back to the university or to reflect on or learn from them

Tackling inequities in disabled student journeys: Developing shared representations for training, evidencing, and solution building HEIF Stimulating Knowledge Exchange funded project Feb – July 2018 Design representations of student journeys that can create shared understanding of barriers and impacts in study Partnering with Diversity and Ability (DnA) and engaging with student groups, other HEIs and sector organisations

Designing an approach to represent student journeys

Open University Student Journey stages. From: Simple Open University Student Journey stages. From: http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/strategy/students-first/sites/intranet6.open.ac.uk.strategy.students-first/files/files/Open%20University%20Student%20Journey%20v2_0.pdf

From http://studentjourney.lancaster.ac.uk/ Complex. But one dimensional. Just the formal activities. No scope for individualisation. Very passive From http://studentjourney.lancaster.ac.uk/

Learning Design: Student Journey Planner Multiple dimensions. But simplistic and too positive / idealistic. Aimed at staff view (learning design tool). Learning Design: Student Journey Planner http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/teaching/learning-design/tools/qualification-design-tools

More engaging for students. Symbolic of the institution

Design workshop conclusions Where does the journey start? This is uncertain and up to the individual Students should benefit from taking part Make it engaging and appealing Offer support for sharing and communication of journeys It should be encouraging – not just the challenges but emphasise their achievements, milestones, goals Image CC Pru Mitchell https://www.flickr.com/photos/pru/33604517410

Board game style aesthetic Allocating emojis to individual events User agency with start points, milestones, etc Online and paper-based versions Variety of use cases

‘Card’ design

Project workshops

Use cases Reflective learning activity for students Feedback at scale Enabling dialogue and support Narrative capture

Reflective learning activity Our Journey integrated into Access modules ‘Wellbeing’ options week Feb 2019 Represent your journey so far What are your goals? What were the main challenges? How did you respond to them? What would you do differently now? (Optional) Share your journey and comment on others

Gather feedback at scale (pilot 2019) Ask a large number of students to represent their journeys Link to a survey to understand student engagement with the activity Compare and combine this with other forms of data Analyse data with staff to understand what they can learn from it

Enabling dialogue and support Use with a tutor, a mentor, peer support or non- medical helper May be useful when: Beginning a new relationship with a support person Explaining different factors that have led to a crisis situation Exploring different elements of support needed Functional (focuses on impact) rather than medical (focusing on condition) Can be added to as an ongoing activity Could become a responsive mechanism for guidance

Interview tool Currently being used to explore impacts of distance learning on mental health (and vice versa) Creates a useful structure to reflect back on Can be completed by the interviewer or interviewee Creates an artefact that can help structure the interview or analysis Creates an attractive representation that can be given to the student

Conclusion Purposely designed to be open to variety of uses Potential to support reflection, feedback, and dialogue between staff and students Online tool and more information: https://iet-ou.github.io/our-journey/