Symposium 11: Students blending learning user preferences

Matching student choices to institutional provision

Abstract

This paper describes the preliminary findings of the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funded project BLUPs (Students Blending Learning User Preferences). The project is part of JISC's Learner Experience Programme and is a collaboration between the Universities of Warwick and Northumbria. The aim of the project is to identify the range of provision that students choose when engaged in informal self-directed learning with respect to these three dimensions:

• Social spaces and individual spaces
• Institutional provision and personal provision
• Physical environment and virtual environment

The project began in March 2007 and is due to finish in February 2009. The pilot phase interviews were conducted during July and August 2007 and the analysis took place between August and November 2007. The main phase of the project is taking place throughout the remainder of the 2007/08 academic year. Final conclusions and dissemination will take place during the final five months of the project. As a result of the pilot phase of the project an indicative typology of students' preferences, linked to the students' rationale for those choices, has been developed.

During the pilot phase, twelve students were interviewed at the University of Northumbria and eight at the University of Warwick. The responses made by the students were clustered into groups with common attributes, in which the choices they made consistently correlated with the factors influencing them. The intention throughout this process was to create divisions that were detailed enough to provide a close approximation of the students' experiences and yet simple enough to be a practical tool to help practitioners.

From the interview data the following observations were made:

• Whether students preferred to work singly or in groups was a dominant factor in their choices of provision. However students who were social online were not necessarily social offline, and vice versa.
• Students' use of technology did not progress along a continuum of less literate to more literate, or less usage to more usage. Some sophisticated users of technology did not use the social networking sites of their peers, but they were using technologies that the social networkers did not. Students used one or other (or neither) of these sets of tools, but not both.
• A minority of students also used additional technologies, but in these instances there was always an identifiable factor behind this usage, which differed from student to student, but was consistent where the factor was present.

The categories developed during this pilot phase were used to analyse case studies from a previous JISC project and were found to be applicable to those data. The categories will be used to structure the interviews and data gathered during the main phase of the project. The main phase will also be an opportunity to further test the generalisablity of the categories.