The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hotsed by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It runs monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our third episode is ‘supporting the international student experience’, and we will hear from Simon Overton (Educational Enhancement Co-ordinator) and Sarah Watson (Academic Developer) as they discuss their experiences and outputs from their recent Education and Innovation funded project: Supporting the International Student Experience at Sussex and Beyond. 

Over the summer of 2024, Simon and Sarah worked with an excellent team of University of Sussex students to develop resources to support the international student experience.

Recording

Listen to the recording of Episode 3.

Transcript

Wendy Garnham

Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is supporting international students. And our guests are Sarah Watson, (Academic Developer), and Simon Overton (Educational Enhancement Coordinator). Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome, everyone.

All

Hello!

Heather Taylor 0:42

Can you tell us a little bit about the project you worked on to support international students?

Sarah Watson

Yes. So, last year I was part of the Media Arts and Humanities Task and Finish group on supporting international students, and the group generated recommendations for improving the international student experience. One of those recommendations was developing and improving our resources for staff on inclusive and intercultural teaching. So this project was a response to the recommendations that came out of that group and the main aim of our project was to co-create resources with students for teaching staff, on inclusive and intercultural teaching from an international student perspective. But fundamentally these are just resources for inclusive teaching practice, and we believe they’ll benefit all students.

In that group, I met a student race equity advocate who helped co-design the project with us, she was amazing, and we wanted the international student voice to be at the heart of the project.

Before we were able to get the project up and running, we had to apply for funding to pay for our students to work with us. I think we felt when we began the project that we didn’t really think we were going to uncover anything new, you know, in terms of, developing inclusive teaching practice. But what we really wanted to do was put the student voice at the heart of the project, to try and make the resources and the guidance we provide more interesting and more personal. So, for example, if we say to staff, it’s really important to give time for students to respond to you in class. Give longer than you think. Make yourself feel a bit uncomfortable. Right? Like, you know, one minute, two minutes, so people can generate their responses to you in their heads. If you have English as a second language, it can just take you longer to do that. This is not a very complicated recommendation, but we wanted to embed the student voice for saying, why is that important for me?  How might [not doing that] ostracize me from the conversation, if you don’t give me that kind of extra time? So, the students were the heart of the project, so we needed the funding. We applied, for the Education and Innovation Fund in April 2024. This is an internal fund to the University of Sussex and towards the end of May, we were delighted to receive almost £5,000 for the project and this was used to pay students for their time.

We worked with 11 students in total. I think one of the reasons we were successful in our funding bid was because the project aims fed into the University’s aims for helping close the awarding gap for international students, at the University. At the moment, at Sussex there’s a relatively high awarding gap between non-EU international students and their home student peers. So that means non-EU international students are less likely to get a good degree, so a 1st or a 2:1, than home students, even when entry levels are taken into consideration.

So fundamentally, the project wanted to listen and work with non-EU international students at the University to hear about their experiences of studying here, and kind of draw on these experiences, work with them to co-create guidance and resources for teaching staff on supporting the international student experience and just inclusive practice in general.

Wendy Garnham 4:05

I think that’s quite difficult actually having the confidence to sort of pause long enough for students to speak up.

Sarah Watson

It doesn’t feel natural, does it? And I definitely fill in quiet spaces, you know. That’s my go to. I have to work against that.

Heather Taylor

You know what, though? This reminds me of something that I when I was doing my PGCert, Tab, you know, Tab Betts, he was doing a session, and he introduced this idea, I think he called it thinking time. And then during the lockdown, when we had these Zoom lessons, I used thinking time. Right? Because we don’t really often give them [students] time to think, you know, so the students are expected to just, I don’t know, have answers as soon as we pose them [the questions].

And I think, actually … I do wait a little while, but it’s something I’m gonna remember to do, I think, again. And maybe even to take the awkwardness out just so we could have one minute thinking time and then you know what I mean? Or two minutes or whatever it happens to be.

Simon Overton 5:12

Yeah. This is something that comes in. So my background was in English as a foreign language teaching, but also international primary education. And, so my approach, with that, for the thinking time, and I think it is a great idea to say we’re going to have 10 seconds, we’re going have, you know, half a minute or a minute of thinking time. It’s also called hands down time in primary teaching. So it’s going be hands down for now, and then you give everyone a chance to think, and then it’s hands up, and then hopefully everyone, more people will be engaging in the question. But for me, that that all comes into, the skills that people have with language. And we tend to assume that everything goes together. So you will quite often have students that who are very verbally fluent, and we tend to assume that they’re also going be great, at writing as well. Or we will have students that are, you know, especially they can listen a lot, they can prepare things, or maybe they submit really good essays, and we assume that they are going to be very verbally fluent, and that it’s not they don’t necessarily go along with each other. My experience in international, teaching has shown me that it can actually be quite profound.

I wanted also just to add a little bit to what, Sarah said. And maybe if I may, to give the sort of, some of the practical sides of what we did. I wanted to mention Abby. She was the student race advocate that Sarah mentioned. So Abby, it was so nice to work with her. Aside from the fact that it took quite a bit of the pressure, or no, no, let’s not say that. We were able to share out some of the, some of the nitty gritty, the rigmarole of getting a project like this off the ground. So that was really wonderful. And she brought an amazing, energy and freshness to it, I think. So that was already really worthwhile, even right back at the planning stage, before we even met any of the other students. Once we had the funding, then we advertised for students across the various networks in the University. And we got ten students to come along and be in the focus group. So we had two groups of five students. And what was nice about that is that we were hoping that they were going to represent, in in some way, the countries of origin that that, many of our students or the biggest sort of cohorts come from. Which as I understand it is, Nigeria, India, China. And we and we did that, and it was kind of lucky. And we had the representation of the schools or the faculties. So we did have some contingency for that sort of built into our plan. Like, okay, if we don’t get anyone from a certain country, then we can sort of advertise again and direct it. But we were lucky we ended up with that.

So we ran the two focus groups. Another practical aspect of it was that we recorded everything. We ran it through some trial software. I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention it. Maybe I’ll do two versions for the edit. Some trial software. Other software is available. And it’s really nice at transcribing. It’s a very powerful tool. And it’s especially suitable for any academic work because it’s quite good at picking up subject specific vocabulary. And therefore, that made a huge difference to us and massively, drastically reduced the time for sort of processing the data, because we didn’t have to transcribe everything.

Abby also, our student researcher, also helped us with that, with drawing out the themes. And then we put them together into the training resources. And this was mostly Sarah actually worked with the students to create these resources based upon the themes that we had identified, in the focus groups. And again, that was really lovely because we were sitting down with them. We were we were kind of planning lessons with them and planning activities with them. And we also did this for the workshops, that we ran.

So it ended up working on lots of different levels. We had the technological level, which is kind of maybe my sort of particular interest, although obviously I have the pedagogical interest as well. But also, there was this this lovely sense of introducing the students, or helping the students, to develop in their research skills as well, which was so nice to do, and so rewarding, I felt. And then on top of that, it was the results that we that we managed to draw from the research that we’d done and, of course the resources that we produced as well.

So it worked on so many different levels and I think it was really rewarding on all those levels as well.

Wendy Garnham 10:23

I guess you might have identified a number of common issues for non-EU international students. So could you say a little more about what those issues might be?

Sarah Watson

In the focus groups the students highlighted some of the potential barriers to learning that they experience when they’re at the University, and one was focusing on the segregation in groups. The segregation in kind of teaching groups, that they spoke about. So often the students would really want to be integrating with home students or international students from other countries, but often this didn’t happen in the teaching space. So when students were maybe put into groups people would go to with people that they knew, and often there might be a reticence for certain students to be working together and that that came up in both the focus groups separately and it was quite sort of stark the way the students were describing it and some students were really interpreting that as actually having a racist element to it. They said, you know, that certain students don’t want to work with us because of where we come from. And so that that shocked us quite a lot, but it also, you know, spoke volumes to us about the potential issues in the teaching space. So, in the focus group, participants talked about how there can be segregation in class, with home students and international students not mixing together, and they spoke about how it would be better for lecturers, or it was really great when the lecturers actually predetermined the groups for the class, mixing international students with home students. They did feel like there needed to be a bit facilitation there, on the lecturer’s part for that. Because, you know, they’re here to study in a different culture, in a different country, and they want to integrate. And they were saying that the benefits of this were being able to get to know people outside of their social circles or people they don’t usually talk to, and this allows the students to learn from one another.

We got some really positive quotes and data of the students talking about how brilliant it was when they were working together with people they wouldn’t normally work with. And it also helps to build a more diverse learning community. So that was one of the largest themes I think to come out of the focus group.

Simon Overton 12:42

And the and what was quite funny and sweet about that is that that really some of the recommendations were things that I would use regularly as a primary school teacher. It was a case, we had, I mean the classic one you do with primary school children is stand in a line from the shortest to the tallest, right? And then from that, now that the students are mixed up, then you can sort of break them up into groups of five. And they’ve been arranged by something other than friendship groups. Now obviously, we’re not going make our university students line up according to their height. But we figured out some other ways of doing that. How many letters do you have in your name? How far did you travel to get here? Or something like that. And this is really basic stuff, and kind of playful, silly maybe.

But that’s actually what people wanted. People wanted to be to be made to stand up, to be made to move around their seats, and to be with other people. Because otherwise you will always end up in a group with the people that you walked in with, who might very well, and reasonably so, be people from your home country or people that you’re already familiar with, or your friends and so on. So as Sarah said right at the start, we weren’t necessarily reinventing the wheel. In fact, quite often we were saying, you probably already know about this. It seems really old fashioned and a little bit silly, but actually it’s quite powerful and it’s what people really want to do.

Wendy Garnham

It does get them talking as well, I suppose, doing an activity like that, you know, in terms of the number of letters in your name. They have to talk to each other to identify where they should go. So it’s quite a useful tool and very fun as well, I would imagine.

Sarah Watson

And I think and the names was another, aspect, wasn’t it, that came out of the focus groups and fed into the workshops. We’ll talk a bit a little bit more about those later, I think. But being able to pronounce other people’s names. So having that activity where you’re introducing your name to somebody else. And saying how you spell it, how many letters there are in the name. It’s all a way of getting to know one another’s names and being able to kind of the beginnings of being able to pronounce them, because often when we have a really culturally diverse group of students, some students might find it difficult to pronounce other students’ names and the lecturer may find it difficult as well. And it’s all about kind of that icebreaker, making it okay to practice and to introduce yourselves to one another and, you know, with the knowledge that you will get it right at some point. Right? But it’s better to try than to not try.

Heather Taylor

And it makes it more memorable, I guess, as well. You know, if you’ve done an activity reading someone’s name, it’s easier you when you see them again to remember that. You know?

Sarah Watson

Because I’m terrible at forgetting names.

Heather Taylor

Yeah. Yeah. I am. Yeah.

Simon Overton 15:25

So the next, common issue and the next theme that we had that emerged from our research was engagement in the classroom. And the participants in the focus group appreciated teachers who actively engage with the class by asking questions to specific groups, creating activities that prompt discussion, going around the room to check or monitor, as we call it, active learning instead of passive learning, and so on.

One really lovely recommendation is to allow lecturers, tutors, and teachers to use different forms of feedback, feedback in class. It doesn’t all have to be verbal and there are lots of ways of doing that. So, and something that we used, in fact, as we were developing the resources was being able to write on post it notes first, get your ideas down. They can either be stuck up on a board, or they can be shared in a group, and you can have one person that feeds back that information, or not. Or it can just be there, then it can be photographed and shared on Canvas, or something like that afterwards.

It’s a bit resource intensive, but I’m quite a believer in mini whiteboards. I think they can be a really lovely way of getting people to feedback, especially if you’ve got a lecture theater that really demands, the sage on the stage to be standing there. The nice thing about whiteboards is that you can write on them and hold it out for the teacher to see. But other people can’t necessarily see it unless they especially turn around to have a look. So it’s a really nice way of getting somewhere in between the sort of privately written note or the anonymous bit of feedback and actually speaking up is somewhere in the middle of that. Obviously, Padlet is a great way of doing that. Getting people to write on the discussion forums that are on Canvas as well. So all of these different ways that you can feedback. It doesn’t have to be sort of hands up, every time.

Sarah Watson 17:21

The next theme to come out of the focus groups were what we’ve called respectful and meaningful learning communities. So I suppose that sort of sense of belonging in the teaching space. Our students wanted to get to know their peers more and they wanted to get to know their lecturers more and we know that content, there’s a lot of pressure for you to deliver your content in eleven weeks of teaching. There isn’t a lot of space, I empathise with that, but the students did talk about the value of staggering the introductions, of making some time to get to know the cohort, and they really appreciated it when the academics did take their time with that, because I think that set them up on quite a good path for the rest of, say, the upcoming kind of ten or nine weeks of teaching.

And there was also talk about differences of opinion coming up in the teaching space and managing that as well. And that can be really challenging, particularly if you’ve got students from different backgrounds. It doesn’t just have to be different cultural backgrounds. They only go in a different background where they might have opposing views. Keeping that quite a respectful and neutral space, a space where people feel brave that they can say and share their ideas, or their standpoint, but can do it in a respectful way so that doesn’t then tread it on anyone else’s boundary of safety. So it’s really hard, I think, to manage that as a lecturer.

But we were talking about the value of producing ground rules or etiquette with students towards the start of term, just to get them even just consciously thinking about what appropriate and not appropriate class behavior is, and really how they’re all responsible for generating positive behavior in the teaching space.

Wendy Garnham 19:07

I think that’s really important for all the students, isn’t it? Just to sort of set the scene of what’s okay and what’s perhaps not so okay.

Heather Taylor

I think it’s well, they never in my experience, they never want to offend anyone, And so you you almost want to save the person doing the offending from that, sort of, accident.

Sarah Watson

And that’s what the students were saying. Well, a couple of them in the focus group that I said something, and it wasn’t taken on board very well. And, actually, I got shut down. They didn’t go into specifics about what was said, but they said they found that a really negative learning experience because they weren’t trying to offend, and it was within a discussion context. And it is really challenging, isn’t it, to manage, that situation?

Simon Overton

Yeah. Absolutely. One thing that I took from that, and this is a very difficult thing to suggest, but, I think it was one of the one, maybe two of the students in the focus groups talked about how their, one of their teachers had a just a little sort of social event. They took one of their office hours and they had a picnic or something like that. And they that they loved that. But it wasn’t because it was a picnic. It was because they were in an informal context. They were able to ask stuff to their lecturer. And everybody else was around and could hear. It wasn’t because I feel a bit like the office hour, I suspect, you you’ve got a smallish office, and that that means that you sort of have people maybe waiting outside, and then they file in. Maybe if you’re lucky, the person behind you will hear the answer. But I suspect that a lot of the questions are repeated things. And for the sake of doing a little social activity, which itself is really lovely, giving people the chance to talk to you, and to and to have everybody listen, and to have everybody interacting in a different space, I think that’s such a wonderful thing to do. I know it might be quite a hard sell for perhaps some teachers that want to sort of finish up and leave it there and, you know, go back home, and they don’t want to go beyond the lecture hall or the or the or the office. But it was something that was really liked by students. And again, it’s another way to engage. It’s another way of allowing feedback to happen, and to generate, as we said here, the respectful and meaningful learning community.

Simon Overton 21:31

We also had some feedback from the students about unclear assessment information. I’ll just go through this one quite quickly. It was essentially that they have different ways, the countries that they’ve come from might have different education systems, and that it’s not always completely clear what is expected. And quite simply, having examples of that, having a list of, you know, this is what you need to say, this is how many words you need to write on it, and something like that. It might seem quite, what’s the word, prescriptive. But my feeling was, well, why not do that in year one? And then in year two a little bit less, and then by year three, hopefully they’ve taken that on board.

I mean, ultimately and the question of rubrics is quite a big one, of course, and probably beyond the scope of this particular discussion. But I really I feel that we are expecting our students to conform to or to approach a rubric or to answer for it in some way. So why not just give it to them? Why not just say, right, this is what you need to do. This is it. Be quite directive about it, and then people know and people have a tremendous feeling of security from that. And then, yeah, sort of wean them off it as the years go by.

Sarah Watson 22:52

The fifth theme was being unfamiliar with university support services. So participants shared that there, well they say there’s a lack of communication about resources and support. I’m not sure that there’s a lack of communication, but I think a lot of the time communication doesn’t get heard because there’s communication overload. It’s almost as though there’s too much communication.

And students were talking to us about, I didn’t know Canvas existed for five weeks until, you know, into the term or I didn’t know the Student Center was actually a physical space on campus that I could go to. Things that kind of blow your mind, but actually this information isn’t getting through to some people. And the students we work with were very switched on students, you know. So you think, well, actually, they’re really engaged students. And there will be some students that, for whatever reason, are less engaged than that and then probably don’t know that these services exist, or these platforms exist. And then that’s only going be to their detriment further. Do you see what I mean?

So I think 1 thing that we learned, that we probably anticipated it at the start was repeat repeat repeat information. Right? Never feel like you’re repeating too many times because actually it is useful even for the students that know a service exists for them to be reminded of it and say, this is here to support you. So these might be things like the Health Center, the Students Union, the Student Centre, information regarding kind of accommodation, all of these sorts of things. The students just wanted to know more about it, but they want to know about it earlier in the term. And they said if our lecturers give us that information, we will really listen. They listen to the academics, right, I think probably more than anyone because you’re in charge of their learning in that in the most direct way. Right? So, we took that on board. We thought that was really interesting.

Simon Overton 24:31

Yeah. And this is very similar to our last theme, which is being unfamiliar with University online resources. So it’s a very similar thing. So we’re talking about, Canvas, Sussex Direct, My Sussex, the library catalogue, and so on. Today, so I’ve been, aside from my normal job, I’ve been volunteering with Welcome Week and helping in the Student Centre. And I spent an hour today with a student, just going through making sure that he could, so just as by way of example, so first of all, getting on to Eduroam, which is complicated. You can’t just log on to the WiFi, you have to download an app. Making sure that he was on Okta Verify, so we now have multi factor verification authentication. So getting him on to that, making sure that he knew about Canvas and Sussex Direct, making sure that he knew that sometimes the information is going be on Canvas, and sometimes it’s going be on Sussex Direct, and it very much depends on the module or the or the teacher. Making sure that he knew how to download the various different apps that he would need, which is through Apps Everywhere, which is itself an app that you need to download. Making sure that he knew the difference between his username and his email address, and all of this stuff that I have actually had to deal with as well as a relatively new staff member. And this is not exactly a criticism. It would be quite nice if we had one app to rule them all. And in the darkness bind them. But so I do get it. But nevertheless, you know, as Sarah quite rightly said, these are these are students who are very switched on, very motivated. Technologically, they’re really up there. They know exactly what they’re doing with the tech.

There is definitely a lot of communication, but for one reason or another, it’s not necessarily getting through. It’s not manifesting. To make it practical, and 1 thing that I really liked very much, and I believe this was a suggestion from a student in the focus group, it was to go for the lecturer to go on to Canvas in the class, up on the screen, and say here’s your assessment information, this is how you get to it on Canvas. Because then it’s right there and everybody’s had a look at it. And to continually do that and not to feel afraid of doing it. This is why I would, as a primary school teacher, call modeling the desired behavior. So you show people exactly what you expect them to do.

Heather Taylor

I think showing people really is important. And, you know when we get told to do things, you know, like the staff and you’ve got an option, it’ll be like follow the instructions or watch the video. I’m going straight to the video because it’s much easier for me, and I think, yeah, that’s really important. And you know what? I do completely empathize with the students having information overwhelm, and having this overload and, you know, getting a bit stuck. But I really hadn’t thought you know, when you just listed all the things they had to do, I thought, oh, my. That’s so many. I’m not surprised they’re overwhelmed. Imagine if we just started here just today and had to do all this In a new country potentially in a new city. It’s like it’s so much. So it’s really important, I think, just to remind, you know, just to remind staff, remind, you know, lecturers that I think even if you’re a few weeks in, don’t get annoyed because there is a lot to take in. They’re not not trying to engage. They just don’t know what to engage with when.

Sarah Watson 28:08

That came out loud and clear, didn’t it? In one of the workshops, one of the students said, sometimes, and this was more about cultural references and content in the teaching, but they were just like, sometimes I have no idea what’s relevant and what isn’t relevant because I’ve got no context for this. Right? They gave a really nice example of, being in their seminar and maybe an academic going, off on a tangent, which is a great thing to do. I’m not we’re not saying don’t go off on a tangent about sort of, maybe an anecdote from them. But they were like, is that part of the course content? Do I need to write that down?

Heather Taylor

I literally had this today. I said I started talking about a paper I’d read once. I said, I’m not an expert on this particular thing, but I read a paper, and then I see him frantically writing it down. I went, oh, you I said, you can write it down if you like, but you don’t have to remember that because I won’t remember that I’ve said it. You know? It just happened to, yeah, it just happened to to come out of my brain. That’s really important, I think, for yeah. Let them know what’s important and what isn’t.

Wendy Garnham

It’s also sort of reflective of their experience before they come to us as well because I think in a lot of, you know, sort of education prior to university, they’re told this is what you need to know, and you just learn that information and regurgitate that information. Whereas, you know, coming to university, it doesn’t work like that. You know, it’s there’s a whole different approach to learning and I think we underestimate that sometimes. We just assume that because we’re so used to it, the students will immediately pick up on that and know exactly how that works. So I do think it’s important to remember that.

Heather Taylor

They don’t know when we’re illustrating a point versus actually making a point that we want them to know.

Sarah Watson

I think that’s why it’s not necessarily that don’t make those anecdotes. Don’t bring in that. Because we want you to bring in the personal aspects of your life that relate to your teaching, and that’s great. But I suppose it is then like you said with your students, don’t worry about that. Say, don’t worry about that. That’s not important. And the students said that, didn’t they? They said, I want to know what I need to focus on first for my assessment. Anything else that’s a nice to have, great. And I will do it if I have the time, but I need it prioritized.

Heather Taylor 30:16

I think this is a brilliant project. It’s really worthwhile. It’s really meaningful, and I love it. You know, you’ve already demonstrated that there’s loads of insights you’ve got from the students, which is just really important for us to know. But if you could sort of pick out some of the key achievements you think you’ve made with this project, that’d be really great.

Sarah Watson

We ran just ahead of welcome week. We ran some workshops with the students focusing on two key areas. So the first one was a workshop for teaching staff at the University on clarifying assessment practice, and the second was on intercultural teaching. And these workshops were co-designed with the students. So they designed the activities and the content and we worked together with them. That was a really fun process to go through. And we delivered them to a relatively small group of people, and we have, you know, the project with the students finished, last week so we can’t work with them anymore. You know, that was our funding. Our funding ran out. But we have got these resources, that we developed with the students so we can continue to run them, which is really nice. And so we’ve got the framework for the workshops, we’ve got the session plans, we’ve got the resources, and we are in conversation with the International Student Officer in the Student’s Union who’s very interested in the project as well and maybe getting other students in, to co deliver those workshops. And maybe, you know, they can tweak them or modify them depending on their own experiences, put their own voice in there. So we feel like these workshops have a future beyond this project.

Simon Overton

That was really lovely. I mean, just to to reemphasize that the students were there with us also presenting and teaching these workshops, which was a really good experience for them. And I think it had quite a profound impact on the participants. I mean, they were able to speak from really to speak from the heart. And I think that that was that was quite remarkable.

You always feel a bit nervous before a workshop, and especially when you’ve got somebody that’s you’ve sort of asked to do it and that maybe isn’t quite used to teaching before. So I was a little bit anxious, but when they sort of stood up there and were speaking so fluently about their experience, it was it was really, really quite remarkable.

Sarah Watson

And just to chip in there, I really noticed that some of the students, actually all of them, they could be quite shy. But when they actually got up in front of people, in front of academics to give their voice and their opinion, they didn’t want to stop. They really loved that. And I thought that was really nice to see because they did feel empowered to be presenting their opinion. They were so well informed, and they had such practical recommendations. It was just so good to work with them on that.

Wendy Garnham

It’s nice for staff as well, I think, to hear it firsthand from students and really sort of hear, you know, firsthand sort of what that experience is like and how different sort of teaching experiences were sort of received by the students. Because I think we make a lot of assumptions. So quite often it’s nice to just hear it straight, you know, how that particular modification was experienced.

Simon Overton 33:23

So we had some, it’s difficult to talk about this that in terms of the feedback because it feels like we’re blowing our own trumpet, but we did get some really positive feedback, in in all different places. So at the at the workshops, we had really great engagement and people coming up after afterwards, and also emailing to say how happy they were, and asking for us to share our resources. We got really positive and kind and encouraging feedback from the different departments that we talked to. And we and we did this ahead of producing, some of the resources, especially the resources that will last a long time, like the videos that we made. Because we consulted different departments. We consulted, people that are involved in English language teaching (ELAS), the comms department, and various other people. And we’re a bit worried. We’re like, oh, I hope we’re not going be treading on anybody’s toes, because it the project is quite, what’s the word – far reaching in its scope, which it should be, of course because it’s about the experience of international students. So we were worried that we might be treading on toes. But they were really, really kind and really cool, and said, wow, this sounds great, and yeah, we’d really like to have a look at this when it comes through, and please share it with us.

And also, what’s come out of this, then I mentioned just now about having some videos. I don’t think we’ve really talked about them quite yet. And to be fair, some things like this have existed in different forms in the past. But as time goes by, this information becomes slightly out of date. So we produced a range of videos with the students presenting them. And now I’m going to try and remember to list them, having spent hours and hours editing them. So we did one about ELAS, an introduction to ELAS. We did the Student Center. We did the Students Union. We did the Medical Center. We did an introduction to My Sussex, and also to Canvas. Yes. And again, these are really lovely, because we have our focus group students. And some of them have got great chemistry. They’re just very funny together on camera and very sweet, talking about that. And it’s very much in their own voice. We did sort of write a script, but they tended to improvise a little bit and to talk about it.

And I think while the preexisting videos were good in their own way, it’s quite nice to have a student introducing these things, and not to just have essentially a voice over on a PowerPoint presentation sort of going through how to how to use, for example, Canvas. So this was really, this was really nice to do. And we, in order to make these resources easy to access, we put all of this into a blog. It’s all properly sort of referenced and linked up with, where relevant, and they are resources that academics can use in the beginning of term or throughout term to tell students about the things that they will need to do. I mean, you would hope that the sort of Canvas, that would be quite near the beginning, but then some other things, maybe Student Center, maybe a little bit later on, and they can be introduced at different times.

Sarah Watson

So that blog was a response to the students saying, we want our academics to tell us about the key information. We thought, well, academics probably don’t have the time to go and find out about all of the different sort of services at the institution, but we have made videos, and an accompanying slide deck with just a bit of text on it as well if they just wanted to share that, that just explain the respective sort of student services that the students will find very useful for their time at Sussex. So we hope we’ve made a resource for academics to share with their students that’s really easy to use and it could just be played in lectures or uploaded onto Canvas, and will be one way of signposting students to relevant support services or tools and platforms that they’re going to need throughout their studies. And just very briefly, we are still in the process of finalising some web-based resources around the respective themes that we discussed. So we’ve got the workshops and we, created the welcome week blog post welcoming your students, to the University. And we’ve also got, web resources on clear assessment practice, building academic communities, inclusive student groups, and the last one, engagement in the classroom. So diversifying engagement in the classroom for diverse student groups. So there are four resources that will be finalized in October, and we’d like to share those across the sector as well. We don’t just want to have those across Sussex, and they are embedded within that is a student voice of the students to help co create those resources in their language, sorry, in their own words and it’s also got some great videos of the students talking about why maybe inclusive group work was important or why respectful learning communities was important. We really wanted to embed the student voice in there and not lose that when we stopped working with the students.

Simon Overton 38:45

Yeah. And another little practical aspect of this, which perhaps can have quite much wider applications, something that we got from one of the departments that we that we talked to during the process was that as Educational Enhancement, and our particular role, that is mine and Sarah’s department that we work for, it allows us to sort of take the side door into the lecture room a little bit, figuratively speaking. So that if, for example, we have a resource or a blog or a video that we share, quite often when other departments or other schools, are trying to produce something or trying to get some information to students, it goes in from the top at the at the school level. And they hope that maybe it will be, what’s the word, cascaded out. And I’m sure that is a very good way of working, and I’m sure that that does happen. But there is the potential for that not to happen, I suppose. And therefore, because we can sort of go in through the side, and because we can be enhancing, as it were, the education and say, well, look, why not try this? Why not show this resource? Why not, use this teaching method? That allows us to get in there in in places that we wouldn’t normally be able to. And I think that speaks to the impact, that this project has had and that other similar projects could have.

Wendy Garnham 40:18

So it sounds as though, this project has already started to have quite an impact on the international students. So I guess if we’re looking at advice for people listening, what’s one piece of advice you would give to anyone working with international students or thinking of applying for funding such as the Education and Innovation Fund for projects like this? Any ideas what advice you would give? What would you be your one piece of advice?

Sarah Watson

It’s like a cautionary tale. So we worked with ten [students] in total, eleven students over the summer, but one of our students had to leave early because they got a job – yay. So really ten students over the summer. And that was a great sort of breadth of perspective, students from different countries, but it was a huge amount of work managing the time and the contracts and ten different people, particularly in such a short time frame. I feel like we make August the longest month ever, don’t we? Everything we can’t fit into the rest of the year goes into August. Incredibly foolish and short sighted of me. And so I think if I did it again, I would have taken more time with the project. We were limited by the fact that we were working with postgraduate students, so they finished study in September. So we did only have a limited amount of time. Perhaps I would have maybe worked with different students. I’m not quite sure how we would have done it, but I think we did squeeze quite a lot into a short time frame. So on reflection, I would have taken longer over certain aspects of that work. But I do think we did spend quite a lot of time in the group, even though we didn’t have a lot of time getting to know the students. We ended up it ended up being a really nice space, didn’t it, where we I really felt like I did know all of them individually. And just as our guidance says, when kind of teaching students, do make making that time to get to know them and building a rapport with them if you can. It’s really difficult if you’re in a really large teaching space, but ten was a really nice number for us. And we did manage to do that. So I think that was a really valuable part of the project. And I don’t think we would have created the resources that we have so well if we hadn’t built that rapport with them and taken our time to get to know them and for them to get to know us as well.

Simon Overton

I think the for me the one piece of, advice, would be to engage with the other departments and the other people that you know, or even that you just think might be involved in the project that you are proposing to run. That was such an eye-opening thing to do. People did not feel like we were treading on their toes. They were overwhelmingly positive and encouraging about the work that we were planning to do. And we were so it’s funny to think back how nervous we were about approaching these different departments and thinking, oh, no, they’re going tell us to get lost, and that, you know, we’re overstepping what we should be doing. But they weren’t like that at all. And that was a really, really worthwhile thing to do, and something that I would really, really recommend, anybody running a project like this, to do. And I think specifically for the Education Innovation Fund.

Sarah Watson

So the application for the Education Innovation Fund, it’s quite a long application. I think that a piece of advice I would have is to make the project potentially a stand-alone project in itself. Though, as I say, for this project now we are going to be working with the International Student Officer in the Student Union. It has got longevity beyond the project, you know, over the summer, and the time frame that we worked within, but it is also a standalone project as well, where we developed outputs that can kind of last beyond sort of the project running, if that makes sense. But I think often for the Education Innovation Fund, I think people want to put in bids for projects that would then need further funding year on year on year on year. So I think the fact it is a stand-alone project does benefit in terms of being successful for the bid. And I also think I’m I think I mentioned this towards the beginning of the podcast is, if you can, dealing with an aspect of the student experience that does potentially feed into strategy, that it is relevant and it is timely. I’m sure that most people who are putting in bids are doing this as well, but even if you might be doing a project, you might be really interested in one aspect of student learning, but perhaps haven’t articulated why it feeds into the strategy. But I think making that point really clear is really good for getting, funding bids.

Heather Taylor

I would like to thank our guests, Sarah Watson and Simon Overton.

Sarah and Simon

Thank you. Thank you.

Heather Taylor

And thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Wendy Garnham

This has been the Learning Matters Podcast from the University of Sussex, created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit The Learning Matters Forum.