 Yn y gweinid y tîm yma mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddiogelol a'r sgwr ffr�io ar gyflwydd a'r sgwr, y ddweud o'r sgwr, yn ystod i'r ddechrau, mae hi fydd yn ei amddangos i ddweud am gweinid. Mae hi fydd yn hynny yn ei ddweud i ddweud, ond byddai'n meddwl ar gyfnod o'r ddweud, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o ffwrdd o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Felly, ond hwnnw r你有 hwnnw eu meddylch yn gwahanol hwnnw fydd hoffwyn o'ch bydd fydd y meddylch waith a bwysig yn ddechrau, felly mae gennym i'n dweud ychydig i'n meddwl i'r meddwl moedig yng Nghymru sydd wedi bod a bod yn rhan o'n meddwl y gilydd arall, Ond mynd fi wneud ei wneud o'r meddwl ond yn meddwl i'n meddwl i'ch meddwl i'n meddwl i'r meddl, ac nid i nhw'n meddwl i chi fydd tref… nid o bwysig beth sydd o ni i wlemp imelrdd, nid o bwysig beth yw i ffurir yma, nid o ff coconut i'w blwysig beth sydd owar yng Nghymru, mae'r rhan o'r prosiectau ym melys Diolch yn gwneud, ond mae'r prosiectau o dda yn angen yig ders, mae'r prosiectau o dda wedi rhoi am hwnnw. Rheswch yn gwneud yn cyffredinol beth sydd yn cael ei wneud. was quite expansive and so we had 5233 participants and we had 244 diary entries which were we would give students prompts each month and they would send me a had to be a minimum of 250 words but off the node right now on the diary entries and I would read them and analyse them and pull out the main themes alongside this we also did quantitative data as well and that was I think I've got some I can change some of that in in the next slides we also did a staff survey as well and that happened quite far down into the project because we sort of suddenly realised that if staff don't saw that they belong in the institutions how can they help students for that they belong and we had quite a wide range of demographics including lots of different diverse institutions as well it's really important to us that we didn't have a prescriptive model so that like Russell groups post 92s or specialist courses and colleges could relate to the research as well and so it was really big we are carrying on the research in more sort of like directives and specific point but we we just given that the crisis the engagement crisis was sort of national and like wasn't it didn't seem to be impacting any particular type of institution more we thought we'd look at like a wide range of demographics in this research we've come up with a theory that belonging is when you when you satisfy all of these four main components alongside adequate mental health support students will feel a higher range higher sense of belonging again this is this is a working theory based on our research it's not it's not necessarily something we can necessarily prove or disprove but it is based off of around 6000 participants both staff and students added together and so one of the one of the things we also looked at was this idea that a lot of students felt the central community at their core level compared to students who felt it at our university level so we looked at the course and we looked at what best practices are happening at course level we spoke to a lot of academics and we spoke to people who are colleagues in the sector who are doing sort of innovative work at the minute around connecting students now one thing that was really really interesting was that a lot of the answers were linked around building friendships and peer connections which sounds really straightforward right if you've got a good support group you're going to feel that you belong more and what is quite interesting is that actually the students weren't defined in these connections as friendships now we've got a lot of pushbacks and staff saying it's not our responsibility to you know foster friendships friendships happen organically it's not something the institution can artificially engineer but actually the students weren't actually looking for friendships they were looking to be part of a learning community which is a very different concept and these are some really good quotes that we have here so I think there was one quote uh no okay into the crowd there was one quote where they were saying like they're not really my friends but they're really important to me and but we we also found as well that staffs and talk a lot about the burden on their time academic staff particularly get laid like given a lot of kind of um extra pastoral work that isn't necessary in their remit and staff were really worried that if they were given a remit to connect students they would add to their workload however when we looked at the case studies and where this was being done in practice on campuses what we found was that if there was a there was a concerted effort at the beginning of the term to form a group a learning community um and this is done really easily it was through things like establishing a whatsapp group for the course that they tutor then leaves very important that the staff then leaves and the students have autonomy over it themselves um coffee mornings anything like this in the first couple of weeks um students would then autonomously run those groups themselves um so it actually and then the students themselves would be able to answer questions around like uh deadlines uh curriculum things that they were confused about they would go to each other rather than the tutor um so it not only did it actually lessen the burden on academics it also gave students a chance to be sort of like a mature group of scholars each of their sort of respective expertise um which is obviously what we we want to learn is um so we've got some recommendations here um so one of the really important things we we found was that all online interaction students perceived as a way of hindering or harming their sense belonging so a really um good example of this is that a lot of transgender students were saying that it was very difficult for them to change their name on the system um and universities where they could change it very easily or they didn't necessarily have to sort of turn up on campus with a deed pole and a new passport um obviously that in that heightened their sense belonging um but also just having like the human aspect of online interactions um being told what the institutions are up to is up to so students would respond really well to things like institutional strategy consultation updates um and lots of sort of like feelings that they're part of the institution the institution wants them to know what's going on and they also value their opinion a lot so a really good example of this is with um community students were uh uh invited specifically to contribute to a strategy um meeting and obviously community students we know are very hard to like foster a sense belonging in um and they said that that improved their sense belonging um the accessibility of teaching and learning is also like a huge it has a huge impact on students and mainly this comes to um being able to access your learning resources so when students face a barrier in access that damages their feelings of belonging it can encourage this engagement so for example um students with ADHD were sometimes finding that resources weren't compatible with the devices they used or the software that they used um and they would have to sort of go like an extra step to try and request that it's made compatible um things like um chart colours not being um not being able to see if you're colour blind really really difficult to understand these things particularly if the if there's no one in the department that has that particular like disability it can be quite difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a student who would have access issues it's not just around disability as well there's a lot of comments around um things like childcare so um going back to the disability one um making things always already accessible is one of the best things that you can do for students since belonging um the second is ensuring that academics are trained and equipped to upload the learning resources as soon as they can after the seminars um so speaking about students of childcare responsibilities or chronic illnesses where they may not be able to turn go to the live seminar having to wait several days that seminar to be uploaded obviously impact sense belonging impacts the academic confidence it makes them feel like they haven't had as much time to familiar familiarize themselves with the resources um as their peers um but really importantly the staff need the support in doing this um because we can't ever just assume that staff know how to do it um so yeah so staff will and readiness again we we found that all the staff we spoke to there was a really um like high interest in making their resources accessible but there was a lot of um concern anxiety and confusion about how to do that um i think there was also sometimes uh staff would worry about um making something accessible to one group and it's becoming inaccessible to another so for example um staff members who want to say that children are young children are welcome into their seminars with new parents um would sometimes bring up concerns for students with neuro diversity who would get overstimulated with like loud noises or would get distracted um by a sort of child um so there's a lots of conversations to be had around how we make things already accessible whilst acknowledging that some accessibility can impede on others um and again yeah so like one of the issues of accessibility that came up over and over again which is why students felt full on in a course level but not university level is because it wasn't consistent across the institution so uh one thing that was quite upsetting to a lot of students is well one student didn't understand why the student health centre couldn't talk to the university and obviously things like gdpr concerns etc but that was never explained to the student and there wasn't any way to remedy this so there wasn't any policy in place around data sharing um so it's it's i find this a lot of this project is about sort of like just nothing that we recommend is really radical like there's no kind of like complete restructure to the education sector but there are lots of lots of little tweaks that can be that we found um as examples of best practice um obviously we all work in universities and we know how big they are as institutions, we know how how departments are very different. I remember when I first started in a strategy team and I couldn't understand why my department had to pay another department to do something when we're all part of the same institution um but students don't understand that particularly school leavers who have had all of their care support educational um resources all of this has been done under a sort of holistic banner um they don't really understand that so again having that clear cut communication with students explaining how the institution works really helps here um in terms of inclusive content um I came into this and had my mind blown a little bit um with inclusive content so my assumption was that it was a case of oh students just want to see themselves represented in the text and that makes them feel nice right like it's oh look there's a a non-binary person in my french text like that makes me and actually it was not that at all we had maybe three comments that uh respect from the thousands of students that we spoke to the vast majority of students were really serious about being able to go into a diverse workplace and perform to a high standard so this was common across different subjects um but came out predominantly in the sciences so for example medicine students were really concerned when they only had examples of Caucasian skin and they felt they would start to question the academic rigor of the course and say I'm not sure I'm going to be able to perform in a clinical setting well because I'm not going to be able to diagnose half the patients I see because I haven't learned that you know what what this condition looks like on their skin um again things like a student who studied a world cinema course it was called and said that there was no Japanese cinema Bollywood or Nollywood and again this impacts things like student satisfaction scores because they leave their course feeling as if they haven't actually learned the whole spectrum of a subject and that there were also comments around um question the expertise of their um academics as well which obviously we don't want because we employ lead in minds and students obviously need to see that um and free speech was also something that came up and this this is really interesting because it came up on all sides of the political spectrum so obviously most of you will be aware that there is um a kind of phoenix like re rising of the cultural wars at the minute to say the least um particularly if anyone reads the Times or the Telegraph on a daily basis which for my sins I have to um but there's a real big thing around free speech and it's not just um one side or the other side of political spectrum it's all different sides um some students don't feel that they can question things like the module they don't feel that they can question the lecturer um so if you go back to the inclusivity some students were like this didn't represent x part of this discipline I don't think I can say that um right wing students often felt that they couldn't express themselves more in student unions actually um and then the facilitation of discussion is something that interacts with the online provision of resources and online space so where a where a educator may be really skilled in facilitating classroom discussion they may not have the skills to moderate an online discussion um and behaviour is slightly different online as well which made some students who weren't necessarily that confident um feel that they couldn't interact or engage in the discussion at all um so our recommendations are training on neurodiversity um training on inclusive design um and presenting course content in global historical and colonial contexts um where there are gaps in the content um we would encourage staff to be open about these and invite students to help close them and the reason we say this is because when a student have to identify the gap they normally have some knowledge themselves that they can represent in the curriculum um and actually uh we found that students that were invited to contribute to the curriculum so for example a student on a um northern american module said a mexican student said I love this module but you haven't got any mexican books and Mexico is in north america you've only got um books from the united states um that student was invited to submit texts that they recommended and obviously that student now feels that they belong more so to the to the university than before because they were given an opportunity to contribute to the function of of that course um obviously that's not to say that every course should like start out as not inclusive and let students uh remedy that to feel um included but it does speak to the power of allowing students as partners in in our in our institution um how am I doing for time so what can I do okay have it um so support is very similar to um accessibility in that we are really um encouraging institutions to make move support away from a deficit model and move it to something like is university wide um it it's not even if a student has their access needs rectified if it's only them having their access needs rectified that doesn't help them feel that they belong it makes them feel that they are an outlier there's someone who needs special help that sort of thing so having you know given dyslexic students a Gramily pass doesn't help that dyslexic student getting that academic confidence it doesn't help them feel that they belong making Gramily accessible to entire institutions so students can't so any student who wants to use Gramily can use it that increases the longing and it's also best practice as well because we know that not all our students are coming from the UK not all who who may be coming from countries that don't necessarily have special educational needs screenings they may be coming from schools that have had their budgets cuts around send students um so you may have a lot of students who are dyslexic or have ADHD who've not got a diagnosis and when institutions start putting up barriers to access and saying you have to have this official diagnosis it means I mean the most um I don't obviously it's not it's a horrible um case but we I'm sure everyone's heard of the Natasha Aberhart case at Bristol it's just a very tragic suicide case where a girl had intense anxiety but before they allowed her to access um her assessments online rather than coming in uh the university sort of sent her around the houses to get an official anxiety diagnosis um and unfortunately it was taken so long that she did take her own life during that time now if if we had always accessible resources to any student then that potentially could not have happened um obviously I can't say that for sure because I'm not a coroner um but it was a very very tragic case it came out whilst we were doing the research which was really heartbreaking for everyone involved in this project to read about um yeah so again a lot of staff are saying you know we're waiting for students to just to declare or we're waiting for students to fail before um support kicks in um and interventions around academic confidence you know they're located in WP schemes they're not across across the institution um autonomy again this links to the inclusivity so students who feel that they are empowered to act if they see opportunity to change um that increases their sense of belonging so again having like what I was saying about the North American module um having your suggestion implemented feels special and I'm confident about this course is really positioning the students as peers and co co-producers of knowledge that encourages them to be sort of like mature scholars in this area um and then yeah the other thing a lot of students are saying I mean so Gen Z move so far so I don't know if anyone has uh ever looked at TikTok but like the the trends are you get like micro trends right they're like three days long and then you're moving on to something else and I think back to when I was at university and if I wanted to talk about something I have to go to like the weekly society meeting and talk about it whereas now things will happen on campus and immediately it's on Instagram immediately it's on TikTok and we can see examples of this happening through the spiking protests that happened uh back in January 2020 no back in January 2022 it's this year um where students mobilised themselves very very quickly around an issue um and discussion and discourse around it happened very quickly now a lot of I remember at the time there was a little bit of communication disjunct between staff and students and institutions and it was because students were having this completely different perspective because of the social media technology that they were using and they were involved in in conversations around the running of their institution and the culture of their institution that the institution wasn't necessarily aware of so it's about meeting students where they're at it's about um learning from our students whether that's what they're discussing whether it's the platforms that they're discussing it on really encouraging in them to sort of take a steer in the institution as well um so yeah increase opportunities for student co-creations that comes out of practice this is a recommendation that this is also something that's seen as best practice from the quality and um the QAA quality ADP yep it's consistent thank you too many acronyms in this like sector sorry sir um and then a yeah a feed forward approach so um again academic confidence can be broken or shattered with bad feedback um we had a lot of uh one-on-one interviews or focus groups where you get to see the um the impact of bad feedback um so encouraging students to have a growth mindset and offering a variety of assessments across the curriculum including utilising technology for assessment as well um and again as for the Natasha and April Heart case like this is something that could have really helped a student um who tried to help try to leave didn't help um so we have got some issues around the recommendations around implementing them we do recognize that they're not straightforward so blurring the lines between the course and everything else the students expect a holistic model or support when you know universities can have hundreds of different departments can be difficult again mental health it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation none of us are psychological clinical practitioners we use the term mental health because it's the term that students offered to us when discussing um their mindsets um but we we haven't got the expertise or qualifications to be investigating whether it's mental health problems at impede engagement whether engagement then creates isolation and mental health problems but again this is something that we do use for our and cultural and systematic barriers so um is someone in a department that encourages innovation that encourages um the the staff to to find new ways of engaging students or are there sort of like it's just how we've always done this attitudes um um oh that's the end okay we've got time for uh kind for a question excellent yeah thank you can we give it to you on the right we've got five minutes so any questions from the group or any questions online first of all the idea of universal access and making things accessible by default um since we're back on campus you know where I've got plenty of time this way academic colleagues are locking things down more great such as access to lecture recordings because they're anxious about students not coming to lectures yeah how do we get that message across to our academic colleagues yeah that's really good there's a really good question actually because um the other issue around that is academics and intellectual property and I want it to be sort of like uploaded online um I think that there needs to be a lot of there's a lot more awareness so one of the things I get quite as somethings on this research I get quite frustrated on is sometimes I will go on Twitter and someone will have taken a picture of an empty lecture theatre and they're like don't ever complain to me about contact hours again um and I'm sort of thinking like okay but absence doesn't mean disengagement for example one of the things one of the issues we have learned and student learner analytics was that students were meeting groups one of them was logging on to the system and downloading the documents and then they were sort of like having a library session and interacting with each other and it was a really like highly engaged session but only one student looked as if they were engaged in that week and so there needs to be a sort of like this is why we had a qualitative aspect to the research that there needs to be like the story like the student view and that can come through student collaboration and student co-creation so encouraging academics to talk to student representatives like what is going on is it just that no one's turning up to the seminar because they're lazy or whatever the day they want to say to our students or is it because there's a cost of living crisis people are taking on what more part-time hours is it that one student is downloading the resources and there's so much like like so much that can be revealed once you actually understand what's going on and really encouraging academics to think it's not always what it seems when students are disengaging but yeah I do agree it is an issue at the minute I think especially because there's a which is why we talk about systematic and cultural barriers like one of the things that's fanning the flames of the sort of like frustration for academics is they're being told by their institution that they have to come in so they're coming in like getting on the tube and exposing themselves to Covid and they're sat in a room and no students coming in and it's that that would be a cultural issue right that's an issue of the department so yeah there's none of this is a sort of panacea but yeah there's a lot of conversations to be had with students to read understand what's going on I know that wasn't like a great answer but hopefully it's sort of answered a little bit maybe yeah okay cool yeah I have a question on it from online what are the recommendations for developing the sense of belonging and community on the programme to university wise spectrum and the university wise spectrum so one of the things that and this isn't an official recommendation but something that came up a lot is the concept of like into faculty learning and like cross campus learning so there was definitely some suggestions around that in terms of like a sense belonging it's not necessarily like the whole institution needs to sort of have a coffee morning with everyone from the university there so what when we talk about community we're not necessarily saying it has to be like everyone goes to a big party it's a case of like the entire institution is aligned in creating the conditions for that student to do as well as they possibly can so when a student goes to their seminar and they've got a really engaged tutor who's like you know they clued up on mental health they know to ask for pronouns or they you know they understand childcare what happens is we found that our participants would actually be back to luck and say like oh I'm just really lucky because my tutor uh did this and then they would go to like the um student support services for like a disability and say the support services were like overrun they would say oh the support services have been no help at all but my tutor was right so we found that basically when when students came to us and they had a very seamless experience where the level of support was consistent that would that would make them feel part of a wider community I understand that the language that we use around this can be slightly confusing I think um I was the same as well because I um so I'm naturally quite an introverted person so the idea of going to the coffee morning is like I would never have done it at university um but actually I do think that people want to be part of a learning community they want to be they want to feel that no matter where they are in this community everyone in the community is there to facilitate their success and at the moment that's not happening probably because we have um sort of high level senior leadership teams who create strategies that don't necessarily work with the frontline staff who are going to implement them and also governance boards are obviously very separate from the main university setting so I mean I don't I was on my university council as a student as in like the governance board because I was a student union president a while ago and even I couldn't tell you everyone who was on that governance board um so you sort of have these strategies that are designed and then not sort of fed down um or staff want to implement them but they don't know how they don't have the resources um staff members hire up maybe don't understand the data demands of staff they don't like there was a really good quote I don't actually think I put it in here but start there was an academic who said something like you know when I have to publish this many papers a year I have to do this many conferences I haven't got times make students feel like they belong like I just don't um so yeah it's it's about sort of um throwing up approach across institutions more questions yes Mr point kind of curing off my question was there anything that came out of the survey about how to sort of increase staff belonging in their workplace so this is something that we're working on at the minute um and obviously we got funding to do the research of the student belonging um but the biggest sort of threat to staff belonging at the moment is insecure job security basically um you know staff not only are thinking about all everything they've got to do but they're also thinking about the fact that their contract runs out in three months and what are they going to do afterwards and we are starting to look at staff belonging at the minute um actually on the site this week we've got a blog from a woman at the Bloomsbury Institute who contacted me after this report launched and said that she had done something called an academic saloon and it had a very similar effect to community building so do you have a look at the site this week because there's a whole sort of overview of that work but yeah basically it's that really like key shaping of you can't pull friends cups like throughout the report um if people want to read it like every single point is that this can only be done if staff are supported this can only be done if um if they feel like yeah like like they're trained and competent to power it out. Do you have a question? Any more questions? Yeah so I've worked with fully online students for about past five years online yes fully amazing and I do find that their voice is missing from studies not just the study like quite a lot of studies that have been there especially over the pandemic but there's been some interesting literature that's emerged past the years on mattering as opposed to belonging and I was wondering if you found any study were you able to identify were there fully online students and the sure and this found a difference because we did a bit of work on inclusive teaching and learning last year and we very quickly dropped the phrase belonging but the students they just didn't like it and I don't want to belong I just don't want to get behind it but I want to know and value to that in matter. Yeah this is like such an interest so I actually saw the mattering presentation online and I retweeted it and I was like because I got a lot of people who do belonging on my obviously follow me and I thought it was a really interesting angle and again I think it's one of these like sort of my brain is going to so I think it's one of these things around like language where to belong is so there were some people who identified like in order to belong you have to conform to the institution right I think that was a criticism I saw so this idea of like well in order to belong here you need to look like this speak like this act like this our our kind of use for the term belonging was that we wanted it to be that you're a student like which is why we have a lot of focus on students as like co-producers of knowledge co-producers of the curriculum things around so for example a computer student had issued library times they became part of like a sort of working group on improving accessibility to in-person resources for students who might be accessing resources at strange hours yeah it was really interesting one actually because there was part of me that was thinking I have been thinking about this a lot since I saw it I'm glad you asked the question because I was sort of thinking like is it if we have to sort of pre-premise the definition of the word every single time we use it like is it worth using that word obviously this is the title that the funding for so I have to use that word but yeah it's difficult because I think that yeah the idea of mattering is a funny one so what is that word mattering and feeling valued right yeah I mean this is just my perspective we haven't run this past like student groups um so for me I think I ended up not being as like not like still being satisfied with the word belonging because I think I was thinking like you can be valued and you can matter to an institution but that doesn't necessarily mean that you are an active agent within that institution so you can be a consumer like you know the customer's opinion matters right and whereas I think I saw belonging as a sort of like you belong somewhere because you're actively contributing to that now that's just my perception and that's based on like you know three decades of life experience as personal to me and it could be very different to the students that you've spoken to um and I think that yeah I would say that it's definitely not something that's like there's no sector consensus on it at the minute um it'd be interesting actually in the next stage of research maybe to start talking to students about language because I think that is it did they give you any like kind of did they offer any explanation was it to do with being online or no they felt excluded by the word belonging yeah as they belong to their families they belong to their communities they belong you know 98% of them were in full-time work they belong to their work faces so they didn't want community but they wanted to join a WhatsApp group so with their assignments very interesting were these mature students or mostly okay so this is a fascinating so I didn't include again I'm so glad you bought this up because I can talk about it that wasn't part of the reason wasn't part of this presentation but um one of the things around peer connections that we found was that um when we spoke to mature students or online students and we were like are you going to join a society they'd be like no I don't want anything to do with student union because I'm 36 wherever and I remember one student who was a she was married to children and she was like I have a support network I have my spouse I have my family I don't want a support network but I do want to be part of the learning community and I do want to feel like I'm part of I'm part of what's shaping this curriculum she used that term but she she was saying basically she wants to belong to the academic side of it but her life is so she doesn't need to belong and I think sometimes with which is why I always say this isn't about like getting everyone together and singing combined like you know that sort of thing and it's sometimes because sometimes I find that this research is dismissed on like oh it's all just wishing washy nice feeling stuff when actually there's like a lot of kind of like um pedagogical kind of like evidence that um feeling feeling like you can actively contribute to something is part of being being valued and obviously does have impact on your student outcomes and that sort of thing so yeah it's definitely not um there's definitely no consensus it's definitely not perfect I think it's one of those things where everyone's sort of like looking at it just from like their use of words or their sort of like background and perspective but um yeah I've come across the matter and ding actually I think someone I think someone retweeted this with that and that's why I came across it and I was like oh interesting okay fair challenge um but yeah does that answer your question or it does and I think that you drill down to learning community I think maybe to drill down for me yeah to look at that and how that's different for the post program mature student because when you think of community you often think that it's something that lasts a while yeah but for that student our student cohort you might be in community for a module because they might step off your program so that's so interesting to join another community so it can be quite different that's really interesting actually of the idea of receiving communities like a longevity thing like I think that's that's definitely something we haven't looked at yet thank you that was really interesting point actually