 Hi, I'm Dr Jacqueline Baxter, director for the Centre for Innovation and Business and Legal Education. And today I'm going to be talking to Carol Sheriff. Welcome Carol. Carol is a teaching fellow in the Faculty of Business and Law. She's chair of one module, a module team member on three and an associate lecturer too. Great. So today Carol, what I want to talk to you about is about your research into teaching and learning. Can you just give me a little bit of background on that and tell us about the project? It's interesting you talk about my different roles because my interest in teaching really comes from that. You know, I have a lot of experiences in AL but come quite recently into the sort of more academic role. And I was module chair of a brand new module on exploring innovation and entrepreneurship. And from my view, it's a fabulous module. It's just, you know, really, really exciting. But when I looked at the first year's figures, there was a little bit of an issue with students sort of dropping out right at the beginning of the module. And you thought, well, why was this happening? You know, it wasn't what we expected. It didn't quite make sense. You know, once students continued past the sort of first TMA point, they stayed to the end. They did very well. So, you know, what's happening? And I was very lucky when the funding for the centre came up. But also, it was the same time where some new data analytics were coming on board for chairs. So, we set out, and I say we because I work with two colleagues as well, to look at, you know, what was happening, what the figures showed us, but also, you know, what the ALs could tell us about, you know, why were students struggling and walking away? And so, literally that's what we did. We were very lucky to be able to commission another AL to do some of the crunching the numbers, if you think of it like that. And then set up our first report into, you know, really retention and success rates on this very new module. Great. It sounds really interesting. And how do you think this is going to impact on the module itself and the student experience? Well, this is really good because that's, to be honest, why we set out to do it. You know, we wanted to have an impact on the module for, you know, immediately. So, in the next few presentations. So, some of the things we found were that we had students from the Open Degree Programme who had not done a business module before. So, we were able to do some material, especially for them, and put it on the module site. So, that was one thing. We also found, and this won't surprise people working in the Open University, but a lot of students were working on at least two modules at the same time. Okay, yeah. And quite a lot of them are also in full-time employment. And then we thought, well goodness me, how do they manage? Yes. And the first project we looked at, you know, do the TMAs clash? And they do. And so, what can we do, you know, to ensure that our students are able to manage their time? So, the first year, the very simple thing we did was just enable students where we knew there was a clash to have an extension on our module because it was very easy for us to do that. Just a week, but it made a big difference for them. But out of that, actually, so there were a number of steps we could take. But if you like, the big question that came out of that is how do our students manage? You know, if they are, you know, in full-time employment and doing two, you know, substantial, because our module is a 60 credit module. You know, we didn't expect people to do other things at the same time. We know they do, but you know, so how do they manage that? And very luckily, the chair and I of the other module, you know, have a similar interest. So at the moment we're working on looking at, OK, how do students who successfully do two modules, how do they do it? And this time we're going to bring in the student voice. So we've got permission to set up a student focus group as well. And of course this will have wider replicability, not only across the university, but for other institutions that are offering such intensive patterns of study. It's really, really intriguing, yes, because I'll confess that, you know, from a teaching perspective, you do sort of feel, why, why are you doing this? This is so intense, but it's very clear that students do do it and do it successfully. So knowing what they do when they're successful and getting advice direct from students is going to be really fascinating. Absolutely, yes, that's great. It sounds very satisfying work and work that should have a really big impact on our curriculum as well. Thank you very much, Carol. Thank you, Jacqueline.