Design your own project

Week 3: group work and reflection

Disappointing attendance this week in the module. We only had about 8 students out of 19. Seems there was some kind of review / reading week in the University that we didn’t know about! So we had to change the plan slightly. Two students who had not attended previously were offered a quick catch-up — a recap of the module so far and an introduction to the projects so far.

The other students talked about their projects and what they were hoping to achieve.

But the focus became more about management and admin really. I repeated the need to start blogging or journaling or keeping records somehow.

We talked about tutorials — time and location. I am happy to meet with students outside the allocated 2 hour teaching slot if that is easier for them and also to offer tutorials online. It will be interesting to see if anyone takes me up on this offer!

Today is Tuesday. The session was last Thursday and so far I haven’t heard from any students about tutorials or meetings. Not an auspicious start to the week…..

My question at this stage is what is the cause of this reluctance to engage outside the allocated teaching slot? Is it due to the nature of the module (as a cross university employability module outside their normal course curriculum), or is it something else? Could it be explained by the fact that this is a level 1 module ? That the students don’t know each other ? Or they are not interested / engaged? It is difficult to know and probably dangerous to generalise. I’m sure they each would have a reason. Something I will have to think about and understand for next year I think.