I’ve rather enjoyed this series of blog posts, as I hope you have dear reader, but with my assessment coming to an end its time to reflect back on the last ten weeks and what we (and particularly I) have learned.

Firstly I’ve learned that posting regularly is HARD. I mean, I already knew that (go back and look at my non-SBOSE post dates to see how frequent they are!), but even with the focus the assignment brought me, trying to find time to put together a well-constructed and referenced article was incredibly difficult. I think I benefit from my writing style directly mirroring my spoken language (some people write using a very different vernacular. I’m naturally this wordy!), which helps me to knock out the basics of a post fairly quickly, but as ever with my MSc, I’m struggling to fit in the reading so that I can structure my arguments and reference suitable points as much as I would like.

In terms of the content, the blog has helped me to clarify my thoughts on the induction and orientation process, and my (again limited) participation in the group activities has helped me to determine which areas I wanted to address each week. Some of my posts directly relate to the content we were covering, while others (such as the Politics of the Playground post) were more observational, and that’s been deliberate. I wanted to mix my experiences on the course with some of my own ideas (it is *MY* blog after all!), and I hope this approach has interested you.

One of the most fundamental changes this blog has made in me is a subtle but clear change in my terminology on induction. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been involved with induction for many years now, but in the last ten weeks I’ve stopped thinking about it as induction and started thinking about orientation. You’ll notice a definite shift in my language from a few weeks into the posts, because ultimately I’ve come to realise that the longer-form orientation is by far the better approach than the short-haul induction that we seem to have been so focused on up until now.

Once I had realised this, the focus for the rest of my posts came together (although that may not have always been apparent from my content!), and looking at the personality types that you might deal with in such an orientation process seemed like a natural step. Its clear we need to be aware of how our students may react in the different situations in which we intend to place them, so we can best support each one of them in a manner which is most suitable. We also need to be able to help those students build up a solid community in which they can support one another as well as relying on our staff.

The MSc BOE is by definition focused on estudents (the “O” in BOE is “Online” which kind of gives it away!), but in my line of work we have to cater to both estudents and pstudents, so I have tried where possible to make the posts relevant to supporting both groups. In some institutions these would be very separate, but I still maintain the belief that students should be provided with as similar an experience as possible, regardless of physical location. This doesn’t mean like-for-like (academically, just recording a lecture and letting estudents watch it is NOT necessarily the best approach), but it does mean making sure that estudents are getting an interactive and supportive learning environment through our online tools and approaches in the same way that our pstudents do through classroom interaction and on-campus services. For orientation, the same concept applies – the delivery, the structure, the technology may all be different for the two groups, but the basic outcomes should be much the same.

Probably the biggest impact the SBOSE module has had on me has been around gamification. Working in a group with my Team David BOE (see what we did there?!) colleagues to deliver a two-week seminar on gamification has been both challenging and fun, and has made me think a lot about how this might be applied within orientation. I think there is a great amount of opportunity to gamify the orientation process to help our students engage with it more effectively. Orientation is always an area that many (most?) students are not going to be bothered about engaging with, so to find a way to improve that statistic would help a great many of those students to settle into their programme more effectively. I’ve only touched lightly on gamification within these blog posts, but I’m hoping I’ll get more opportunity to explore this topic later in the course (I can feel a dissertation coming on…!).

As a final post (prior to this summary) I touched on the resource implications of our orientation process. Particularly for online orientation, heavy resourcing can be required, but its critical we understand the need for this to provide a really seamless and interactive orientation programme. Most critically, and this applies to all taught programmes as much as just to orientation, you need to develop, resource and support your programme with a well-integrated team of suitably skilled and focused individuals. These could (and should) come from a cross-section of the institution – academics and professional staff working together, fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! (Aykroyd, Ramis, 1984). Wait, sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, a strong team who understand what’s at stake and work together to provide that seamless experience we’ve mentioned a few times now.

The orientation process can be so much more than most institutions currently implement. It can have a positive impact on student results, retention, confidence, behaviour and so much more. Its an area we should be investing in and developing further, and I’m pleased to say that as a direct result of these posts I have taken the first steps to doing exactly that within my institution. We’re aiming to develop a strong, academically-focused semester-long induction that will be personalised based upon each student’s needs and missing skills so that by semester two we have a higher base level of student skills on which to build. I hope to continue posting here through that process, once it begins in a month or so, so do watch this space!

I hope these posts have given you something to think about around your induction and orientation processes – if any of what I’ve discussed has inspired you to action, please leave a comment below and let me know!

Image Licensing

Featured Image © Copyright Flickr user Erika G and licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 2.0

References

Ghostbusters. (1984). [DVD] New York City: Aykroyd, D; Ramis, H.