 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for the opportunity today. As mentioned, our individual proposal today is from Shannon College of Hotel Management. This is a school of the College of Business, Public Policy and Law in NUI-Gaue. Our project today is number two, under number three, it's an individual project. It's called EXIS. This is an online executive skills development program. Our project team. Firstly, my own name is Trevor McCarthy. I'm the program leader for our core programs in Shannon College of Hotel Management. I lecture in hotel operations, facilities and hotel law. My colleague presenting today with me is Gwen Ryan, the Librarian and Disability Student Support Officer. As you can see from our project team, it's quite varied in our skills and covers very different people and skillsets within our school from inter-cultural communication skills, life skills, operations, accountancy, library and other supports. And we think this adds to the whole development of the online program. Now, I'll just pass you over to my colleague, Gwen, right now to continue with the presentation. Okay, so Shannon College has a very diverse international student body. I don't know the exact percentages, but I think over 60% of the student body are non-Irish. So we have quite a substantial number of Indian students, Chinese students, students from other Asian countries, students from other European countries, North America or whatever. We also then would have a number of students who have disclosed learning disabilities and other conditions like ADHD, like anxiety disorders, autism spectrum disorders. And I'm sure there are a lot of other students as well within our population that maybe have conditions that are undiagnosed or undisclosed. So the college is quite small and I think all of us are very, very interested in student engagement. So we wonder why there are certain students that find it difficult to make lectures, why some students find it difficult to get assignments in on time or there might be difficulties with group work, students not wanting to work with other students, or why maybe a lot of the Chinese students opt to kind of socialize together rather than integrating into the rest of the college community. So we know that academic ability is not a factor here because everybody has reached the level to get into the college. So we think that perhaps the problem might be with personal skills or personal self-management. So that's what this executive skill proposal is about. So would you be familiar with the concept of executive skills? So we'd all be familiar with organization, planning and prioritization, time management. These types of skills would often be included in academic skills offerings. But there are actually about 12 different executive skills. So the other ones would be task initiation, goal directed persistence, metacognition, working memory, sustained attention, emotional control, response, inhibition, flexibility and stress tolerance. So we all as individuals have both strengths and weaknesses across all of these skills. So this project is about, I suppose, helping people to become more aware of their strengths and weaknesses. So for instance, somebody who is very strong and sustained attention, they'll maintain focus despite distractibility, fatigue or boredom, they'll complete tasks even when they find them tedious or difficult. They can avoid distractions, delay gratification. Whereas on the other hand, people where this might be a problem, they will get distracted easily, perhaps don't finish tasks or whatever. So realizing this as a problem can allow that individual to put steps into place such as modifying the task, dividing it into discrete chunks so that it can be done and swapped with other things or whatever. For myself, I suppose working memory I think is a problem for me over the years, manifesting itself in forgetfulness. So nowadays I make lists for myself, I have reminders in my calendar, I always put my keys and my phone in the same place so I don't forget them in the morning. So I suppose by middle adulthood a lot of us are aware of the problems we have and our strengths. And we've either worked on things or we've life hacks like I've just described to kind of compensate for them. So this program will give our students this self-awareness. Similarly, we understand that intercultural communication skills are essential for working in today's global workplace and they're successful for collaborative work in college. So I guess this project is all about developing this online suite of tools that will help students to transition into the multicultural third-level learning environment that is Shannon College by helping them with both their intercultural competence and then in developing their executive skills so that they can self-manage, self-regulate and hopefully be successful academically. So in terms of what we hope to deliver, first of all it is this online executive skills development program so it will be an online tool moderated by academic staff and we're hoping to include some sort of anonymous peer coaching as well. And again these skills we believe are critical for personal success. As well as working through maybe the different skills that the students decide they need to work on they'll also understand the contribution of these executive skills or executive functioning to personal success both in college and work, life, relationships and they'll be able to develop these skills by working through personally relevant content. So they'll do an online self-assessment first only they will have the answers to this. This will let them know where their strengths are and their weaknesses and suggest then the areas that they might like to work through and then they will set themselves a smart goal so that's a specific, measurable, I never remember what A is, achievable, relevant and time limited goal to work towards. So I suppose the moderation and the peer coaching comes in here to help them achieve their goals. We also want to, we have a great student environment it's very multicultural, it is on the whole integrated but we would like to improve on that, there's always room for improvement. So the intercultural communication content will help students to think and reflect on the issues relating to their own cultural values, beliefs and perceptions in order to develop their own awareness of how they communicate with others in the student community and then beyond in the wider multicultural environments that they'll be working in. The project then will also have some professional development opportunities for the academic staff that are engaged in this project. So there will be a little bit of training there'll be a refresher training and intercultural awareness all staff will get a good overview of executive functioning and the types of things we can do to improve and compensate for weaknesses. We will also have training in how to moderate online environments and I suppose as was alluded to at the start this is a new process for us. Shannon College is only part of Ennio Aigawa for the last three years or so so we're trying to build new capacities particularly in the area of research so we're also hoping in this project we'll have two published outcomes which would be new for the project team and then also we believe that this type of content would be useful and valuable across all disciplines so we would hope to make the online content available at the end on open access for other higher educational institutions to use so the individual packages would be created as scoring packages and we were very taken by the allaboard.ie program there so it'll be sort of have that kind of look and feel I would imagine. Just moving on to the next aspect the plan for what we're doing over the four quarters I suppose in quarter one we look at the whole development of the project team that are taking this project on building the academic staff and their competencies we'll be looking at the needs analysis training workshops in the first quarter but also laying out a plan for the following three quarters and looking what we need to achieve and plan setting up the spec and the plan for what we need from web developer to bring this content forward quarter two and quarter three will look at the whole development so this will be the individual development of the modules the tool and then bringing the content together and this will be over the two quarters two and three quarter three will be the deployment of this content and the testing so the plan for this is that it'll be worked with our year one students a hundred of them in our BBS and B.B.Com hotel management and international hotel management and that'll be used as the first 100 people to use it and evaluate it by the end of quarter four this is where we'll evaluate we'll look at this intervention how it has worked looking through how individuals have engaged with us and the feedback also from the students as well and this will also come into play where we look at the promotional aspect of how we can spread this out and bring it out to further institutes throughout the country so the impact and sustainability I suppose the impact and sustainability is that it will create an online platform it'll be developed and updated on a regular basis and also looking at specifically certain modules whether it's intercultural or certain behaviors that have to change for a certain time that allows us to update and change it so it's a long lasting impact so individual access modules will be made available and can be downloadable so this makes it more achievable for other institutes whether they want to use all the modules or individuals and applying to their Blackboard, Boodle or Canvas or etc what they use their individual institutes the academic staff will receive training they'll receive training executive skills enhancement and I think already from our project team when we've sat and we've met and discussed together it's already improved our total awareness of all different modules that we're now starting to share and learn together and so this will continue to the platform over the years and make it long lasting so there's a long sustainable achievement from this platform so the instructor materials will be produced they'll provide support and advice workshops will be structured so they'll be identified and already have been tested so they can be rolled out and used elsewhere so again it looks at the sustainability of this excess platform following this post project evaluation as my colleague mentioned as well Shannon College is now moving into an area where we need to look at research to bring our research levels up to the National University of Galway and this is our opportunity that can we look for developing research publications and bringing it out to you know promotional conferences and gives us the opportunity to build our level at the research so just bringing back the feedback that we received we thank you very much for your feedback and for a college that we are very much student led and student involved we feel that it's something that we need to engage more with and bring our students more involved with what we're trying to do with this platform so again as mentioned earlier we mentioned about the peer student anonymous support in this platform I think with this is online it is individual that people will work through it at their own pace and in a personal capacity but there's also the possibility to bring student involvement with anonymous support with each other also we looked at student involvement participation in the project in somewhat underdeveloped again we look at the possibility that we could look in quarter two where there is a bulk development of individual modules and content and we could look at getting a student research assistant as part of this overall and a key part of what we have in Shannon is that we have a very strong teach and learn committee this represents each of our years that are in the college so there's representations from students and from staff and this allows us to meet on a regular basis to share and discuss what's happening so this platform of access would become a very strong part of our committee going forward in the direction and engagement between our students and our staff at a teaching and learning level so ladies and gentlemen I thank you today for your time this is our program we hope it falls into the category of success we feel it would be a great advantage for our students and our staff and I suppose going back to NUI Galway our strategy for vision 2020 is very much focused and centered around people and that's why we feel that this is very much focused around people and students and we hope this can bring and develop us forward thank you very much