Careers education case study (5): Expanding an existing first year careers module to accommodate more students from more disciplines at a university in the West Midlands
The challenge
To deliver a generic, credit bearing first year careers module in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) at Aston University. Challenges include the increasing numbers of students from an ever wider range of subjects.
The solution
The original module consisted of five two-hour workshops, with course work including group poster presentation and an individual action plan and summary of learning. When the numbers exploded from 40 students to 120, the delivery of workshops and course work marking began to mount. The load was shared between academics in SEAS and the careers service, with workshops delivered simultaneously to groups of 30/40 students. It was decided that lectures 2-5 would be delivered as audio files on WebCT to save repeating lectures and to guarantee consistency of delivery. In 2008/9 SEAS changed its VLE to Blackboard 8, so the decision was made to update lectures. This time it was decided to record lectures as video files using Mediasite. There are four virtual lectures in total.
Outcomes
This academic year we have 250 students enrolled on the module. They can access the lectures and supporting materials on Blackboard 24-7. The module continues to be credit bearing and part-owned by the careers service and SEAS. We still use group poster presentations as an assessed task with the individual assessments done as a 40-minute on-line test at the end of the module. An additional benefit of using Mediasite and Blackboard is that the virtual lectures are open to any students enrolled on a Blackboard module. At least one other course is advising students to access the materials on the open resource part of Blackboard.
For further information on this case study, please contact Steve Thompson, Senior Careers Adviser, Aston University Careers Service.
What are careers education case studies?
These case studies have been compiled by members of the AGCAS Careers Education Task Group, building on the good practice developed in the Careers Education Benchmark Statement. They aim to show the diversity of practice and how careers education is developing as a discipline within HE. We hope they will inspire other practitioners to share their experience by drafting case studies that we can publish during 2009. If you have any comments about this section, or would like to submit a short case study summarising your own experience, please contact Iwan Griffiths.
Read all case studies in the series.
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Created on: 04 February 2009
Last updated: 13 March 2009