Continuing my look at the student induction and orientation process for online and blended learners (“estudents”), I want to consider how induction has developed from that which we provide to our face-to-face (or physical) students (“pstudents”).

Traditionally, the induction process for pstudents takes place in the week prior to the start of teaching, and revolves around getting them acquainted with their programme, institution systems and the physical environment. This often includes a variety of talks from staff members from around the university, some of which are more immediately relevant than others (pstudents are usually keen to know how to find their first classes, but are less interested at that time about the intricacies of library database search syntax, for example).

More recently we have seen a move towards a longer-form induction, taking place over the entire first semester (or in some cases the entire first year of study), including in my own institution. By running compulsory induction classes at appropriate points within the timetable of studies, the key information the students require can be more effectively taught, spending time emphasising important aspects through activity that is often not possible in a tight pre-teaching induction week. This also allows the opportunity to share knowledge using a more appropriate timetable – those library database search terms are of far more interest in the weeks leading up to an assignment deadline!

With blended programmes on the rise, our pstudents are moving more towards being estudents and our induction process needs to follow suit. The longer-form induction suits a blended programme much more than the old approach, although there may still be a traditional “welcome” weekend/evening/day, depending on the form of blended teaching being undertaken. This can, however, focus much more on the community aspect of the course – getting the students to meet each other and their teaching team and allow a sense of class identity to being to emerge. It can also allow for the first proper teaching activities to be set up and introduce the students to the approaches that will be taken.

I have direct experience of this, during my time as a Learning Technologist in Scotland. My institution there ran a blended Business Management programme which held a compulsory weekend orientation just prior to teaching beginning. Students were not allowed to continue on the course that year if they did not attend, so turnout was always 100%. We ran a number of activities, around group working and community, both physically in the classroom and also online (within a computer lab) to familiarise the students with the online systems they would be using for their studies. Those activities would purposely bleed into the first couple of weeks of teaching and would set up the subsequent activities being set out within the official taught curriculum, as well as those being run at subsequent on-campus weekend events (which occurred monthly).

This allowed me to consider how a similar approach could be taken with our estudents attending programmes using a purely online delivery. That sense of community is much more difficult to build up without physical attendance, and certainly not possible if running an induction day or week before teaching. The community often builds itself, through the teaching activities and a shared interest in understanding how the course will operate – often you will find greater interaction through the need to clarify the wording of an assignment, for example, than through a set activity. I’ve noticed this myself, during the first module of my MSc in Blended and Online Education – my initial discussions with classmates were often more to do with understanding what was expected of us and figuring out how to balance the time needed with the rest of our lives.

More critically, estudents will often only engage with those aspects of the programme that they deem important, so building in the aspects of induction into the timetabled teaching is often the only way to get your students to engage. This was very much the case again for me during module 1 – a couple of weeks into the module the BOE team pulled in a faculty librarian to discuss how to use the online library facilities they had provided to us. I know that I wouldn’t have joined that online session during the first week of the module, as I was still balancing course and life, and had more important things to worry about! Once I knew more about the assessment for the module, and the readings that I was going to need, it became much more important to me to understand the library services, so the timing was about right.

As these online processes develop for our estudents, we are now seeing these practices feed back into the orientation process for our pstudents – the longer-form induction I mentioned earlier has come about in part by our need to run online inductions in that manner. But we are also seeing that the practices used within the long-form online induction are modifying our idea of the long-form physical induction. We can more easily apply different approaches to, and see the results of, induction when working with the normally smaller groups of estudents on a given programme, and this research can then be applied more readily to the bigger groups of pstudents.

There is a lot we still need to learn about what makes a really good induction process, and both the online and physical approaches can provide examples of best practice that the other can learn from. Next time, we’ll start to look at what actually makes an induction work well for our students.