First steps towards a blended pre-sessional


Student engagement with this unit may reflect the value students place on language development but also, perhaps, shows that students saw the relevance of this session to their writing assessments. The positive response to Language for Writing and Writing to Learn was encouraging as this confirmed our decision to digitise these units.


In terms of least popular units, students


found Learning to Reflect the least useful. This was disappointing, as it was a new unit, but not entirely surprising and supports findings from previous studies on the use of reflective journals (Kim, 2013). Some teachers indicated scepticism about the value of this unit so there is clearly a need to review the online reflection tasks. The other new unit was Listening to Lectures in your Discipline. Response to this was mixed, with slightly over a quarter of students seeing it as useful and slightly less than 20% perceiving it as one of the least useful sessions. Admittedly, it was the unit with the least connection to the Scheme of Work, and lack of student engagement suggests that the relevance and transferability should be made more transparent. Gathering materials for these sessions involved collaboration with subject lecturers, which was one of the positive outcomes of the project, and we intend to further develop this unit. Finally, some student comments suggest that they did not always see a link between the online sessions and the in-class sessions despite the positive response to the closed questions (Table 1). Making the links more explicit is something to improve.


FUTURE DIRECTIONS


Based on this initial analysis, the first stage of the digitisation project has been generally successful, particularly Language for Writing and Writing to Learn. We have not yet analysed the quality of student engagement in the blended units or reviewed the teacher feedback. This feedback, along with our reflections, will guide the next stage of the project. Our priority is to further develop the four Cs, creating innovative online spaces for student collaboration in content creation, knowledge construction and critical evaluation. We envisage this will give the students more responsibility and agency in their learning. For example, in Language for Writing, students could create input and output activities for their peers, and in Writing to Learn students could co-build a bank of different genres in their fields for textual analysis. Finally, we hope to share our experiences with the wider EAP community and contribute to the development of good practice across the increasingly international higher education sector.


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