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

2. Overview Introducing Our Journey Background and rationale
Design process
Use cases

3. 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?

4. Background and Rationale

5. 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

6. 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

7. Designing an approach to represent student journeys

8. Open University Student Journey stages. From:
Simple
Open University Student Journey stages. From:

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

10. 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

11. More engaging for students. Symbolic of the institution

12. 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

13. 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

14. ‘Card’ design

15. Project workshops

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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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: