 felly i ni, ond mae'n gweld i gyda y dyfodol, yn ddiddordeb gyda'u llawd yn gyfrannu gyfoedig o hyd i gyfrannu gyfrannu gyfrannu yn gyfrannu gyfrannu gyfrannu gyfrannu. Mae'n gweithio'r llawd yn gyfrannu gyfrannu ar gyfrannu gyfrannu gyfrannu. Mae'n gwirionedd Clairswater. Mae'n gymuned Lleid ar Birmingham City University i'r cyfrannu cyfrannu gyfrannu gyfrannu gyfrannu. Mae gennym iawn i'n gweithio i gael eu cyfnoddau i symud yn ymgyrch i fyfynol i'r ffrindiol. Mae'r cyfnoddau i'ch gael eich ffynol yn ymgyrch i tanfer o'r cyfnoddau i gyda'u cyfnoddau a'r cyfnoddau i gael'r cyfnoddau i'r ffynoddau i'r ffrindio. A gweld i'r cyfnoddau i'n gweithio i gael, byddwn i'r Alisyn Ryby, Catherine Woods, Craig McGill, Dion Barton, Catherine Mann, Samantha Hearn, Ben Walker, Hilary Enghred a Wendie Troxell. Wendie is joining us from Texas today, and due to weather conditions over in Texas, the connection may be unpredictable. We have five members of the editorial team, Dr Emily McIntosh, Dr Wendy Troxell, David Gray, Oscar van der Veinhardd and Liz Thomas. I will now hand over to Emily McIntosh, our UCAT Vice-Chair for Research, who will be presenting on behalf of the editorial team, so we will make a start. Over to you, Emily. Thanks so much, Claire. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. It's lovely to see you all, and today marks the launch of our amazing special edition of Frontiers in Education. We've been working on this for the last two years. It's an amazing achievement on so many levels to be with you today and to be talking about the launch of this special. A couple of years ago, when Liz first brokered our relationship with Frontiers, we wanted, as part of the research committee, to really move forward and increase the capacity and the quantity of research in personal tutoring and academic advising. I'll go through some of the things that we were thinking through at the time, but I think it's safe to say that this special edition marks a significant turning point in the creation of advising literature and the important note around advising practice internationally. When the research committee was first established under David's leadership, there were a couple of ambitions, and one of them was to demonstrate impact of advising, and the other was thinking about how advising has outcomes that can transfer into everyday practice, and obviously the research gender can have a massive impact on that. As part of the research agenda, UCAT established a research mentoring program. Many of our authors are alumni of that program, which is fantastic to see, and we wanted to support colleagues to conduct and publish research on advising, and several have published as part of this Frontiers special edition and in other areas as well. We've also had the privilege of working with Wendy and other colleagues at Nacarda to develop and promote the global advising research space, and Wendy's going to talk to you later on about how this now plugs into a very big project on a thematic study that's shortly to be published. So when we secured a special edition, we went out to lots of colleagues to see what they could be working on, which could potentially feature within the special edition, and this is the e-book that has been published as of yesterday marks the end of that particular project. Next slide, please, David. Oh, I can move the slides. That's good. Sorry, I forgot that was a co-host. Okay, in terms of personal tutoring publications in a UK context, as you can see from this graph, we've had a number of books and articles published in this space over the years, but the golden age of personal tutoring back in 2009, there were six articles published, and there was another renaissance back in 2017 with five articles on advising published, but it's not an area in the UK where a lot of research exists, and one of our ambitions through publishing this special edition was to really promote advising as a research space and to move forward the research and practice of advising as well. Through thinking through some of the implications, we wanted to think through thematically what kind of advising research would benefit those practitioner spaces as well. Next slide, please, David. Okay, so UK peer-reviewed publications in detail. There are currently 10 books out there on advising, one forthcoming through for critical publishing this year, hopefully. From 2002 to 2018, there were 42 peer-reviewed articles in the advising space published in the UK, but between 2019 and 2021, there's been another eight articles that have been published. This special edition includes 14 articles, which as I'm sure you can see there is a big and significant contribution to the research space in advising. In terms of other journals where research has been published on advising, there are three articles in the Journal of Further and Higher Education published between 2019 and 2021. The important thing to note is that Frontiers offers these in a curated space. The other articles are from Education Action Research, Active Learning and Higher Education. Ben is one of our authors, and he's also published an article in Active Learning. David and others have published in Further and Higher Education. There are also some other pieces. Samo Hearn has published elsewhere as well. So there is a bit of a movement now happening within the research space in the UK advising context. Next slide, please, David. So a quick overview of the special edition. We have a very strong editorial team. It's been an absolute privilege to work with my colleagues, Liz, Wendy, Oscar and Davis. We all contributed in various ways to bringing this special edition to life, and I just wanted to express my thanks to them all for their great academic company and for all of the support that they've given me and authors in getting this off the ground. I also wanted to thank some of our reviewers who really pulled out all the stops to review our pieces, and I think that was a really important piece in moving this forward, particularly when the pandemic hit a year ago. So our ebook and our collection features in Frontiers in Education with a particular strand of leadership and education. There are 14 articles in total written by 25 authors and global contributions to advising. We have contributions from the UK, the United Arab Emirates, the USA and Australia. We have a mixture of articles. We have research articles, policy and practice reviews, conceptual analysis pieces, hypothesis and theory pieces, and also perspective articles. The articles can be accessed with the link there. The ebook was published yesterday and can be directly downloaded as a PDF on the website. Next slide please, David. There are loads of core themes and contributions, so the editorial outlines the contribution of the collection to the advising research space, but there are five substantial themes within the contributions themselves. So some pieces look at the skills and competencies of advisors, looking at professional standards, the design and development of digital training resources. Others look at the impact of advising on student engagement, student voice, partnership, student transition. Some articles look at the application of tools and techniques in advising and tutoring. Some look at the impact of advising on attainment, mental health and student well-being, and others at technology, learning analytics, online spaces in advising and tutoring. As you can see from that list there, there is no space in higher education that advising does not touch in all of its beautiful ways. I think hopefully this special edition will emphasise just how important advising is to a pedagogical practice, and through Wendy's work with Nicarda, really bring this into mainstream learning and teaching spaces and talk a lot about the impact that advising has. One of the things I did want to say as well is that the editorial does take into account how higher education has been disrupted significantly through COVID-19, and offers some inroads into how advising can help with those spaces as well. Next slide please, David. So we have some key contributions, and it's lovely that many of our authors are here today. A big shout out to Catherine Mann, who is staying up way beyond her bedtime to be with us from Australia today. So thank you so much Catherine for being here. We have contributions across three sections of the ebook. So the first section we have contributions from Craig McGill and colleagues, including Dion, and then we have Ben Catherine, Luke Millard, and his colleagues from Birmingham City University. We have Annabelle Yale, Allyson Rabie, Hilary Goldspink, and then we have Catherine, Angela Partington, Ricky Loes, Samo Hearn, and myself, David and George as well. And then we have my colleagues as well from other universities too. So I'm rambling now because I am aware of time, so I'm going to ask for the next slide please. Okay, so we have already had or garnered a lot of impact since these articles were published. So Frontiers operates in an online first space. And what that means in practice is that as each article was reviewed and accepted, it was published on the Frontiers web page. And so we've already had quite a lot of impact. There have been over 22,000 views on the research topic page now. That figure's gone up and almost 2,500 article downloads. There are some articles with over 3,000 views already. And Wendy will talk to you about the impact that that has on the content analysis, but I think those figures are really reassuring and show that this is a much needed and much wanted space for colleagues to explore. And Wendy will cover that later. Okay, so without further ado, I think we are going to introduce our first speakers. So next slide please, David. It's my very great pleasure to introduce Alison Rabie from the University of Lincoln, who's going to talk to you about her article on student voice and personal tutoring. Alison, over to you. Thank you, Emily. So my study focused on student voices within personal tutoring at the University of Lincoln. I asked the research questions. What do students think of their personal tutoring experience at the University of Lincoln? Do students see themselves as partners with their tutors? What language do they use to describe that relationship? And how does the experience of international students compare with home students? I started off with a lit review, which you can read in the article. I'm not going to go through that now. Then an online questionnaire followed by 30 semi-structured one-to-one interviews with students across all the colleges at the University. 167 students responded to the survey. And the key findings from this were that 70% of students reported that they attended their group tutorials. This is the odds with what tutors say about their group tutorials generally. So this could be that students completing the survey were typically more engaged with personal tutoring than most other students. The main reason students reported seeing the personal tutor is for academic support. Although 24% mentioned that they would see their tutor for personal issues. 41% said that academic support was the most valued aspect of personal tutoring. And 38% mentioned that it was just knowing that someone is there for them. After the survey I conducted interviews, 12 of the 30 students I interviewed were from overseas. So they were from Austria, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Ghana, India, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. So quite a broad range of countries there. The first question, my research question, what do students think of their personal tutoring experience? So generally this was positive. Students described tutors as friendly, helpful and supportive. Students valued the fact that their tutors are approachable, available and informal but at the same time professional. Most students said that they were happy with the level of support they received. However, some noted that they would like their tutor to be more proactive. A small number of students stated the relationship they had with their tutors was unfamiliar as they didn't have regular contact with them. Some would approach their personal tutor first, particularly if they were experiencing problems, whereas other students would go directly to the most relevant person in the university. So it seems that some need the tutor to act as that conduit, while others are happy maybe to find the most appropriate person or service themselves. They approached their personal tutors for a wide variety of reasons. Those reasons could be things like coursework and grades, careers advice, dissertation advice, mental health issues, information on relevant services, financial help or just some assurance. Often they want form signing or tutors to write references, workload and extensions in terms of assignments or just general pastoral care. The second research question, do students see themselves as partners with their tutors and what language do they use to describe this relationship? Most students felt that they had a voice and that tutors would give everyone an opportunity to speak. On the whole, they felt listened to and that their feedback was acted upon. Personal tutors encouraged interactivity and encouraged students to feel confident. However, there were some students that stated that only one or two students contributed to the group sessions. Some stated that they would not feel confident saying things if it could be taken the wrong way or they didn't feel comfortable speaking in a large group or some students said they felt like they did all the talking and that it was difficult to get other students to contribute and they felt like they were kind of a group spokesperson. There wasn't an awful lot of evidence that students see themselves as partners particularly with the international students. Some of the home students mentioned they did feel that they were partners but then the language they used to describe it wasn't really consistent with that. Then my final research question was how does the experience of international students compare with that of home students? The largest observed difference I found here with the majority of the international students was that they would rather contact their friends and family often back in their home country than speak to a tutor about personal issues. However, most of them did say that they were happy to contact their tutor for academic issues. I also discovered this in the literature review that it might be about cultural differences meaning that international students maybe feel a little more distant from their personal tutors than home students do but this is something that I'm going to be exploring in a lot more detail in the coming few months. So really just three points tonight from the research. The first one is that all members of staff could be seen as personal tutors in a way as many students will just contact whoever they feel is approachable so whether that's a programme or a module leader, whether it's a member of professional services, they will often just go to somebody that they know is approachable. So a sensible approach to this might be to provide training to all staff enabling them to act as effective gatekeepers to support students so that everyone's got some kind of basic training on where to sign post students to if necessary. The second point to note is that personal tutoring sessions could be a useful vehicle for students to give feedback on aspects of their university experience. Some found that the group sessions were particularly useful for this. It could also be an opportunity for their voices to be heard in a more informal setting than say answering survey questions. But to achieve this it's recommended that group tutorial sizes are small which you know in a lot of cases is not always possible certainly at Lincoln in the business school that's not always possible. And the last point to note is that tutors of international students particularly should receive more training specifically around interaction with students of different cultures and be prepared to be more proactive in their support taking time to cultivate that relationship. Okay thank you very much you can read more in the ebook. Thank you. Terrific thanks so much Alison. David next slide please. Next up it's my pleasure to introduce Catherine from Goldsmiths University of London on the development and design of an interactive digital training resource for personal tutors. Catherine wrote her piece when she was still at Warwick University. Catherine over to you. You've done the part at the initial part of my presentation for me so thank you very much Emily. So yeah the my article in the journal the development and design of an interactive digital training resource. It provides a case study of the development and the design of an online training, an online training resource for staff in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick in 2018. And this was a time I'm going to take you back to when we were all a little bit less deeply involved with online learning and when there was still a degree of novelty to delivering learning through online means. The aim of the study really was to provide practical insights to others from my experience on how you might want to go about designing online training for personal tutoring. So the personal tutor training resource that I designed had a range of aims. Firstly to enhance staff and students experiences of personal tutoring. Secondly to support the introduction of a new personal tutoring policy at the institution so it had communication function. Thirdly to support best practice in the administration of personal tutoring and its associated admin duties. And finally to raise awareness of when and how to sign post students to relevant services and where appropriate. So in designing the training I set out, I started it really by identifying six kind of key design principles and I think things are useful to anybody that's designing learning online at the moment. So the first of these was to make sure that the training was designed with the needs of learners in mind and designed as a learning activity. I think when training is often designed there's sometimes a focus on communicating information and I think one of the really key principles for me with designing this was ensuring that personal tutors were treated as learners. The second principle was to ensure that the training was engaging, that it had multimedia elements and it also had interactive elements as well so it wasn't just clicking through all kind of reading information. The third design principle was that the training was designed with input from stakeholders from across the university at every stage and so that was good for promoting engagement and also for ensuring that the correct information was provided within the training. It did a lot of the work for me. The fourth was that the training resource should be accessible for people with different levels of digital literacy but also kind of different accessibility needs and connected to that was the fifth design principle which was that the resource should be very clearly structured and that people could dip it in and out of the learning as required and sixthly that it should be developed in a flexible learning environment and this was to do with the sustainability of the training as well. So the resulting training that was designed the ultimate training was divided into four parts and the first which provided introduction to personal tutoring, the second which looked at personal tutor meetings, the third section was on administration and the fourth was on signposting and each of these sections of the training were developed within the H5P presentation tool within Moodle and included a range of text, images, videos, quizzes and other interactive activities like question and drag and drop activities and so on and also links were provided to further information and resources within the training as well for people that wanted to do a deeper dive. So the training as it was released was optional but we were really pleased to have had a significant take-off of about 60 to 70% from staff and also to have had positive feedback from staff who engage with the training. It also seemed to contribute to improving the student experience of personal tutoring in the year that it was implemented and so in the year that it was implemented the faculty's national student survey scores for academic support went up from 73% in 2018 to 82% in 2019 and the introductionist training was the the key faculty initiative in that year. So in brief conclusion I think my case study demonstrates above all the interactive training online is a positive training option for personal tutoring and its key benefit is that it enables users to complete it in their own time and it can be accessed multiple times by users whenever they need so it can be an ongoing source of guidance and support as much as a training resource. But I think it also shows that for these sorts of interventions to be successful there also needs to be really careful consideration given to the needs and requirements of personal tutors as a group of learners, clear identification of design principles at an early stage in the design process and finally good stakeholder engagement at all stages of the training design life cycle. So thank you very much for listening and I hope this inspires some of you to move the training online so thank you. Perhaps Catherine that's excellent. Okay next slide please David. My pleasure to introduce Craig and Dion who are going to talk to you about the skills and competencies for effective academic advising. I don't think Mavish is with us today is she. So Dion Craig over to you. Thank you very much. So our paper is situated within the broader framework of professionalization which is a sociological process that describes how occupations transform into a profession. It's important to note the US context here differs from how advising looks in other places. In the US there are both faculty advisors who teach and do research and and service and and then also do advising but there are also primary role advisors whose main role is to work in an advising setting. Professionalization matters because it helps occupations to gain influence and autonomy over their work. It helps them to vie for resources and it improves reputation and increase public understanding of the work of that profession. So our paper comes out of my original qualitative study which was my doctoral dissertation research in which I examined the perceptions of 17 Nacata leaders about the professionalization of academic advising. This was done through semi-structured interviews which lasted anywhere from one to three hours and this was done in the fall of 2016. Initially I did open coding that produced not only my dissertation but further produced three other papers including a specific focus on leaders attitudes about professionalization, the academic advising process itself which will be published this spring in the the Nacata journal and and two papers that are in progress which describe features of a profession and and also kind of looking more closely at the career ladder issues and academic preparation within academic advising. For the current paper I recruited two outstanding international colleagues to help me look at this data through their own lenses and non-north American experiences and for this paper the data set was reexamined using a deductive coding approach or directed content analysis and so I'm going to ask my friend and colleague Dion to to talk about our findings using this approach. Thanks Craig, thank you. So with Craig's data we examined it for evidence of professional values, professional skills and behaviors and continued professional development or education it's known in the US. In terms of the professional values the results indicated that the key values that advisors, tutors, should embody include caring for students, the desire to work with the diverse body of students and a commitment to student success. In terms of professional skills and behaviors we found that advisors, tutors, need to possess patience and empathy, listening skills and have the ability to oscillate from the tiny details to the bigger picture. Also effective communication, understanding of the curriculum and collaborative efforts came out as key for advisors and personal tutors and a strong tutor relationship needs to have that communication in a manner that values the diversity of student experience and backgrounds and then finally our findings confirm the importance of continued professional development and training for advisors and personal tutors so that they can be informed of international best practices and remain informed of institutional changes. Thank you. Over to Emily. Thank you Dion and Craig, much appreciated. Over to Catherine from Melbourne. Hi Catherine, thank you so much for staying up late to be with us today. Catherine's going to talk to us about advising by design, co-creating advising services with students for their success. Catherine, over to you. Thanks Emily and I'm really excited to be here in UK time. Yes so today I'm going to talk about my article. I'm a professional staff member which means I lead a team of professional staff advisors although we have just instituted an academic advising model at the University of Melbourne but my article really focused on how at the university we've been instituting design thinking to ensure that the student voice is upfront and centre in every single thing we do with students and what's of what examined in the paper is really how that process has become embedded and what we've done to design that throughout the university. Design thinking is a kind of pedagogically and methodologically sound method. It's been used in education for a long time. It's used in many other disciplines as well but it really creates space for students to concentrate on their own learning outcomes and to really embed action learning. It's also something that is systemic so at the university we use it across a range of stakeholder groups, students being one of them but also staff, academic and professional staff and even the business side of the university so it's really enables lots of people to come together with lots of different voices but in the area that that I'm in which is student success it's become a mantra to always say when staff come up with new ideas but what do students think? Let's test that on students before the idea even becomes any sort of project plan and the university has done that at both the strategic as well as the operational levels so that at a university-wide level any project that comes forward is to do with students starts with design thinking workshops or human-centred design workshops and this is quite different in terms of engaging student voice than the traditional stakeholder method where there may be a project that then is taken to the students to be consulted with to see what they think this is really a ground up kind of process with students being at the at the centre and so they're really at the beginning and it's really about how you set up projects one of the benefits of doing it this way is that you reduce the lag time that often comes with large data or big data in many projects they can take months if not years to get off the ground when you're actually looking at a university-wide strategic initiative and this can really help get some of those ideas fast and mitigate any risk around deep investment in projects that may end up after that lag of not being relevant to students so I looked at kind of four different ways we've embedded it within the university in four different little mini case studies the international onboarding experience we have about 40% of our students we have about 65 000 students at the University of Melbourne about 40% are international and we were really really interested in how to design the journey from the minute the student gets the offer to the minute they step on campus and what that looks like it gave us a real opportunity to think about pre-commencement advising and how we would engage students with other students to learn about the university to a point which really seized on their moment of excitement receiving that offer and wanting to then do something about it rather than waiting a couple of months until the university experience began so that was a really eye-opening exercise for us to engage in so that we could really create relevant advising services we ended up using lady-year students to do peer-to-peer advising for that particular project as we learned that students had different perspectives obviously to what staff thought and really grounded us and made us change some of our views in terms of that change process that can happen with design thinking I think one of the most important ones for the university was a project we did around supporting student performance one of the areas I'm responsible for is students at risk of poor academic performance across the whole university and we had an established process but felt that it could be vastly improved and rather than staff designing that really wanted to work with students what was it that they would like to see that would really support their academic performance and the way we set up the project was that there was some hypotheses but before we went forward with them we ran the hcd workshops with students to find that in fact our hypotheses were not on the right track they in fact students conceptualise this vastly differently to the way staff did at the university and that that point of intervention was too late and and not relevant enough for students that they wanted support much more up front this led us to a number of different projects and in fact I must say during COVID has been one of the most exciting things that has enabled us to accelerate the outcomes of this project by instituting a student outreach and referral service so that we can provide personalised, intrusive and intensive support for students through partnering with our business intelligence team to use predictive analytics so that's been a fantastic outcome from that. One of the other projects was at a more operational level a co-curricular award for our students how do we get students to engage in co-curriculum as well as co-curriculum how do we get students to have to be fantastic well rounded graduates and we put out a call on our student portal we had over 400 students respond to that we selected four groups of students about 150 in the end to run intensive design workshops and one of the methodologies that the university has been using is the British Design Council's double diamond method we had students in two hour workshops where they implemented that particular methodology within those two hours to actually create, ideate, change and produce their own co-curricular awards so as a learning experience it was fantastic to see the students engaged in intense action learning to see them come together and make new friends to learn with each other across disciplines and to see students who don't traditionally represent not our student leaders or our student representatives but whenever we do humans and design workshops we make sure that we get students who perhaps haven't engaged with the university in a formal sense before who don't know how it works who just experienced the university from a standard student perspective so it's always a very refreshing experience for us to hear students who are not political who are outside those kind of hierarchical structures so that offers that fresh voice and our final project that I took about the article is at a very localised level where we are trying to engage more students in advising we do a lot of one-to-one advising and we're trying to extend it to group advising so getting students to design their own student experience through using design principles and that now we've been running for three years and students come along and it's extraordinary to see them learn from each other and to discover that there is more on offer than what meets the eye so I guess that the piece that I'll leave you with about this particular article is that there's some hopefully inspiring ideas about how whether you're in strategy, whether you're in a department, whether you work with students individually or in a group consider using human-centred design to really make sure that whatever you're doing with students has absolute relevance to them because their voices are embedded from the very beginning of the project. Thank you. Much appreciated. Next slide please. Okay. My pleasure to introduce Sam Herne from University College London. Sam has been doing some very important work on learner analytics and she's here to talk to you about her step change framework. Sam, over to you. Hi, thanks Emily. So the step change framework is actually from the Investors UK and it's something that got published back in 2017. So I'm just going to put a little context into this. I look at this through three very different lenses because of my background. So I was a secondary school teacher, I was a form tutor for eight and a half years. I had been an information security officer and so I had been through all the GDPR training and ended my my sysb exam and my master's degrees in intelligent systems. So I'm aware of how the systems that learning analytics are created with actually how they work. So the stats and kind of the data models behind them. And in 2016, I started to work on a project at UCL to look at what data we had and could that be used in a way for learning analytics. And when I was looking at this data, there were things in there that for me started to ring alarm bells and things that were of course concerned. So there were things that could signify a potential welfare issue in addition to well-being and potentially lead to poor mental health. And around the same time, as I came to the conclusion that this data could be used in this way, and I was presenting this at the art conference arguing how we could use this learning analytics data as a tool around well-being, with a paper about why we would and why we wouldn't want to. University of UK published the step change report, which was the report about a whole institutional approach to student well-being and mental health. And in that report that they spoke about using analytics to identify well-being causes for concern. So that got published in 2017. In 2018, JISC launched the National Learning Analytics Service. Okay, so at this point, I'm starting to think, okay, so you've got this recommendation, also comes up in the IPPR report, actually around student mental health, that was also published in September 2017. And are we actually doing this? Are we aligning this learning analytics machine well-being? Are we taking well-being into consideration when we are designing and deploying these learning analytics systems? So I basically canvassed a bunch of institutions that reached about eight replies and they shared with me their policies on learning analytics, student support and student well-being. So this piece of work, this project consisted of three things. It consisted of quite an in-depth literature review, looking at the advising literature I looked at learning analytics and the frameworks used for developing learning analytics and how they're currently deployed. And there was also a data collection. There was also a survey to the institutions about what data they collected and how they used it in advising in here. So there's quite a bit that went into that piece of work. And what I found is looking at these policies and the development frameworks is that the well-being was kind of lacking from them. Obviously the step change report is now in the university mental health charter, but there was no kind of clear evidence that it was a consideration in it. So there's no consideration for the impact of this on staff and students because any technology you deploy is not an instrument, it's going to have an impact. And we know from research around students looking at dashboards, if that's not coached or supported, they can react in very different ways. And it can be really quite emotive and can cause more harm than good in some cases. So that was kind of missing and that was kind of one of my main concerns really, is that we have this tool and it's quite a powerful tool, but we need to really carefully think about the impact of this on people. And when you look at the policies and how they talk to each other, the learning analytics policies talk directly to the academic course to concern ones in some places. And that was a really clearly defined process. And in terms of the process is what I found is that the day-to-day support, the teaching and the advising is there is a policy, but it's quite woolly. And it's not a very defined process. There are recommendations that things should happen. But when you get into something a bit more serious, like the well-being course concern, and what's the academic course concern, they're actually far more defined and have clear steps and certain things have to happen in a certain frame of time. So when you look at the well-being process, and this is usually the mental health process you know, it's clear that there is data there, which is kind of why I did the survey, but it's not clear where it comes from. And there's not a clear communication between the two policies. So in some cases, the learning analytics policy explicitly mentions the academic course concern. There is no explicit connection between the well-being and the analytics stuff. On top of that as well, you don't get communication in the way that you would like. So you don't get communication between professional advising necessarily and advising around well-being with personal tutors. Okay and that can be quite tricky because you can have a personal tutor that's pushing a student on the academics not knowing that there is an anxiety issue. So there needs to be much more comms there. In addition to all of that, just in general around learning analytics, there's still very little good quality evidence of what would say a proper evaluation studies of any of the interventions working. So we've collected data, we've rolled out systems to do this, which you can see that some of this data might be quite intrusive to collect, it could be seen as surveillance potentially, but we still have no real evidence that it actually works, that any of these interventions work. So then if you start to you want to pull this data you want to use this for things around welfare and well-being and potentially mental health, which are much more complex and difficult, you know, and have far more potential serious side effects, then that needs a lot more study and a lot more consideration. But it also means that you need to be much more careful because the minute this data could be used for those purposes, it suddenly becomes special category data. So it does need an awful lot more care and consideration. In addition to that, is the data that we have adequate? You know, is it granular enough? Does it tell us enough information? And this is where current dashboards may not be completely up to scratch and it's a piece of work that I'm starting to look at now really. This kind of comes to my last point that currently all the work, so even though dashboards are predominantly used by advisors, the focus on them and the literature around them is all around the teaching and learning, it's not necessarily around the advising practice itself and how that works and the impact of the student behaviour with regards to advising. So that's also something that needs addressing. I'm terribly sorry that was quite a weird ramble. Please email me if you want some clarification or please read the paper. There is quite a bit in it and I have tried to kind of give you a nafifi, but I don't think I did that particularly well. So I'm going to hand back to Emily and stop rambling now. On the contrary, I think that was really amazing. Thank you so much and as colleagues are able to that your article is there for people to peruse at their own leisure. Thanks, Sam. Next slide please, David. Okay, it's my pleasure to introduce Ben. Ben has been prolifically writing articles here, there and everywhere and he's here to talk to you about his contribution to this special edition on professional standards and UCAT recognition. Ben, over to you. Thanks very much, Emily. Yeah, I'm not sure about here, there and everywhere, but I'm trying, but thank you for that great introduction. Good to be here with you and welcome to everyone. It's really good to have so many people from all over the place. So yeah, fantastic. Thanks for listening in, tuning in. So yeah, I'm going to be talking about my article on professional standards and recognition UK personal tutoring and advising. I'm just going to start off by reading a quote really that certainly the writing up into the paper I took inspiration from and it's from our colleague Craig McGill who's here with us today and has already been talking and Charlie Nutt and this is a quote from one of their publications taken from one of their publications in 2016. It reads, as higher education acclimates to the disequilibrium caused by change, the stature and legitimacy of academic advising will rise. During this time, all academic advisors will be increasingly judged on their expertise and knowledge, as well as their abilities and the results of their work. As a result, they will be seated at the decision making tables at colleges and universities across the globe. We predict that by 2025 academic advisors will garner respect from all institutional leaders and faculty members. So a bit of a prediction into the future there by Craig and Charlie and that really sort of gave me inspiration for this paper and certainly the writing up of it. And this paper that's in the frontiers edition through a focus on professional standards is really trying to explore the urgent issues pertaining to personal tutoring within that assertion of Craig and Charlie's, in other words or namely its importance, skills and attributes associated with personal tutoring and advising, its recognition and importantly as Craig's already mentioned actually its professionalisation and also the codependence of all of those elements on each other and trying to look at all of that in the context of what is sectoral flux and change within the HE sector. So as for the paper itself, it was a literature review supported by data analysis from a survey that I undertook of views of professionals in the sector in three main areas. Those three main areas were firstly the necessity of sorry and benefits of potentially distinct tutoring standards as we know most of you will know is now represented by the UCAP professional framework, the relevance and usefulness of pre-existing standards, the extent to which personal tutoring is valued, rewarded and recognised and that last category recognised in its broadest sense but also specifically professional recognition which is something slightly different and again UCAP has its professional recognition awards here which came out around the same time of the write-up of the article and just after I did the research. So those were the three main areas that I looked at in terms of the findings both from the literature I suppose and illustrated by the data from the survey. The first question overall to really be answered I guess is are distinct professional standards for personal tutoring necessary and useful? Well our survey said 74% of those surveyed said that yes they are certainly necessary and useful because they have the perceived benefits that most of you would probably agree with or potential benefits in terms of raising aspirations, helping with workload, increased buy-in institutionally and sectorally. Interesting enough what also came out was that that usefulness or perception of usefulness was dependent on their purpose so would they be used to measure impact? Would they be used as baseline measure which I think is an interesting question for professional standards? The meaningfulness itself is dependent on the content so the skills and competencies it may not be of surprise for you to know that those surveyed stated that. There were those who said no they didn't think they were necessary or useful that was about 21% although this didn't know as well and their reasons for stating that were quite interesting because I think they highlight some of the issues around the use of standards and recognition. They talked about them being too abstract. Would they have any positive impact? Would they be too reductive? Would they be too rigid? And there's an interesting comparison that we can make here to the teaching and learning standards that we have like the UKPSF that many of you will know in that many people say that about the UKPSF but that doesn't stop them being used as the minimum baseline professional standard for our profession so shouldn't we have something similar for personal tutoring is kind of my view that I promote in the article. So quotes to illustrate that someone said tutoring has a unique combination of skills and competencies so should definitely have its own framework of qualification clearly and those in the 21% who said maybe no they're not needed said perhaps maybe the UKPSF should just have more emphasis on it as in tutoring and advising. Second question main question looked at I guess is are pre-existing standards relevant and useful for personal tutoring? Of those surveyed about 74% that said that the UKPSF was useful from relevant for personal tutoring however many said oh sorry others also talked about the national occupational standards the NUS tools that we've got out there and their own institution standards has been useful to a degree however many stated that they didn't have enough detail for the distinct skillset that personal tutoring and advising needs so a lack of specifics and overall there was a picture of limited use of these standards in people's practice and then recently Craig and Dion's paper that they've been talking about they talk about the relevance of UCAT, Nicarda and the sort of standards that myself and Emily and Dave and Andy in our book talk about as being relevant as well. So a quote to illustrate that the UKPSF is a particularly little use for recognising tutoring and advising practice for professional or primary role advisors. Third question what value recognition and reward could be associated with professional standards for personal tutoring and advising? What that brought out really as you can imagine is value recognition and reward are quite complicated complex nuanced concepts and they are all interlinked but what came across really was a picture of personal tutoring being invisible work it was undervalued it was under recognised. There were diverse opinions when it came to professional recognition and whether that was definitely needed which might be partly due to how people interpreted that word recognition. Did they mean recognition in its generic sense or did they mean it in terms of professional assessment and reward in the way that the UKPSF does and of course UCAT now does through its recognised advising roles awards. 65% of those who did the personal tutoring role alongside their tutoring role said that it was needed but interestingly enough those on in primary roles primary advising roles 100% thought that that professional recognition was needed which is an interesting comparison. A minority thought that professional recognition wasn't needed at all that teaching excellence covers it already which again goes back to the relationship between the UKPSF and tutoring standards that I've already talked about and said that personal tutoring has had a subordinate or minor role. A quote to illustrate that people talked about tutoring and advising being a burden not a privilege and that there was not enough national focus on this role. So in conclusion then based on the literature that I looked at and supported by the data of the survey that I carried out this paper really argues that there is support evident for the establishment relevance and usefulness of bespoke standards for personal tutoring and advising as now embodied in the UCAT professional framework as we know and that view is really justified by the fact it would help address the fundamental contradictions and tensions that exist within personal tutoring at this time in terms of under resourcing and carrying out a personalised tutoring approach in the face of the specification of higher education. This was not felt across everyone who was surveyed however it was very much in the majority and just lastly in terms of implications for policy research and practice really what this paper argues is that the embedding of standards and professional recognition for tutoring advising is highly necessary that value and recognition and impact there are parallels there with the UKPSF and a lot we can learn from that because there is a mixed picture of evidenced impact when it comes to the UKPSF and teaching and learning and it also brought out an interesting new insight I think about the relationship between personal tutoring and teaching practice so as Emily's talked about as well tutoring and advising as pedagogy I think is really interesting it's an intertwined area can personal tutoring be situated more strongly as a mode of teaching and that's an area I think for future work and future research so thank you very much for listening and back to our host Emily thank you so much Ben that was marvellous next slide please David okay it's my pleasure to introduce Hilary Hilary is going to talk about her work as a tutorial as academic care so Hilary over to you hi there thank you everybody lovely to join you all today I'm presenting on behalf of my colleague Sally Goldspink and as ever all research and all literature and work always happens within context and it's important to note that the base of our paper comes from research undertaken by Sally where she was looking at the lived experience of adult distance learning in this research she wasn't looking at the process of distance learning are you the technology she was looking at well how do people learn at a distance and from that research we identified there was a dominant narrative of care where the tutor was key within this care so we had quotes such as they understood what it was all about for me feeling cared for the tutors as caring people but we also had other quotes such as I don't think they've got it or I just felt bottom of the list now bearing in mind the respondents in this research were all at a distance these people have never been on a live campus so to speak or their learning was remote and we really asked that question of well what is this care narrative and what does it actually mean and how do we gain and garner this concept of care and that really led us to thinking quite deeply about what we mean by the tutorial as academic care um now within the work that we do we quite often we we teach we do research we do lots of things but tutorials are part and part of what we do when we work with our students um but it's not necessarily something we think too much about as we've identified in this webinar so far today um we schedule our tutorials we meet our students um and quite often we measure these things so we meet relevant metrics and we think about what we're doing in relation to learning outcomes and maybe meeting assessment criteria and students are generally happy um but we really ask this question of are we as tutors actually making the most of this learning space and the data seem to tell us we could be doing more with this learning space so we we took it upon ourselves to look at what we mean by this idea of care and how care can be used within the academic tutorial process um now the literature on care um suggests that care is the connecting to others um in terms of values and personal disposition um and edit noddings relates this to education um by stating that the state of being in relation to characterised by receptivity relatedness and engrossment um and there are really nice ideas but what do we actually do with these things um we wanted to know what could make someone feel again more from their experience and again looking at the data we identified certain traits that seem similar to the idea and concept of care um and here care is framed a solicitude or as an attitude towards others and this started to really speak to us um by looking at three different types of solicitude um the first is in difference where the other person goes on noticed um and I don't think that really happens in academic tutorials um however there's an authentic form of solicitude and I think it's possibly where we accidentally leap in too soon um we pre-empt what the purpose of that tutorial might be we pre-empt what the value of that tutorial will be we pre-empt what it is we think is going to occur within that tutorial and that is often framed in relation to what it is the student is learning and how it is the student needs to prepare that learning in order for some other form of assessment um and actually it might be at this point that we're disabling um students um because we're leaping in too soon and we're not giving the students the space to really be curious about their learning and to be courageous when they're learning to ask hard questions to have that independence to be able to think I think this is what I understand and I think this is what it means but I need to play around with these ideas in a safe context and we would argue that actually by reframing the academic tutorial as care we can start to develop what had it had a go call authentic solicitude uh where people leap ahead where they're supported to be curious to make their own decisions about their thinking and to be in charge of their own projects and in in effect be in charge of their own existential self um and not really made us think quite hard about how is that we can garnest this authentic solicitude because we want our students to be independent autonomous thinking thinkers we want our students to have learning that is more than just situated in that time and place it wants it to have a long term lifelong effect um so we we set forward a series of questions which you can see on the right of your screen as you're looking um at your screen and with this we I developed a number of questions that we as tutors can ask ourselves during our tutorial spaces but also to flip it around for students to ask the same questions about themselves about that tutorial space so if we start by asking things like for example how do I routinely greet students um we can also say well how do students routinely greet their tutors um in which ways do we personalize the learning to students similarly the students can ask in which way can I personalize my learning to make to be relevant um and going down through the boxes it is that case of forming a question that we can ask as well as we're doing our tutorials but the students can also ask the same questions of themselves and by doing so we might have a more reciprocal um courageous curious type of learning where learning is played with it's experimented within a safe space so students could start to make those independent thinking decisions about their learning and the beauty of this of course is it doesn't need any extra time we're doing tutorials anyway but this could be a different framework in which we conduct our tutorials but also in that reciprocal working relationship with the students where we both value authentic learning in order to develop lifelong learning thank you very much thanks so much Hilary and um my regards to Sally who can be with us here today next slide please okay last but not least is our colleague Wendy from the Nicola Center for Research Wendy I hope you've been hanging on there with your internet connection yeah that's a it's a miracle today actually stoked that you can be with us Wendy over to you appreciate that can you hear me okay absolutely we can okay wonderful um well thank you so much and thank you colleagues for for your work I've been thinking deeply about about the things that you've presented especially in the context of this content analysis that a team has been working on we started this project a few years ago with a goal to scan the literature that was focused specifically on academic advising and personal tutoring or whatever it might be called across peer reviewed journals published in English and the project comes out of a partnership between the Nicola Center for Research at Kansas State University and UCAT and the team consists of three individuals on our call today myself David Gray and Emily McIntosh and also includes Dr Lisa Rubin from Kansas State University and Insoon Hogan who's our graduate research assistant in the center through this collaborative effort we started coming to an agreement regarding what type of articles would satisfy our requirement that the article under review be primarily related to academic advising and personal tutoring and and as you can imagine that took quite a bit of scoping and refining with regard to search terms and boolean phrasing and and that kind of thing because if you think about the literature of higher and further education virtually every study that relates to students and student learning and supports for students and how faculty and staff work in that context has implications for advising and tutoring so we started being pretty strict on our searches and opened up a bit as we moved through the process of determining that and then established a shared database as you would do for content analysis to populate the variables so here you see some of the issues that we grappled with as we started to dig into each article with regard to the scope quite honestly this is where we've really struggled putting this first study to bed because the more we read each article the deeper we are engaging with them and the wider the threads really have spread with regard to the complexities of the influences context and theories related to advising but eventually we landed on the dataset under analysis so you can jump to the next slide so this was quite surprising to us we ended up with out of you know tens of thousands of potential articles we had ended up with a little over 700 articles but the thing that amazed us the most was that these these articles were spread over 140 different academic journals only two of which are journals identified as as focused specifically on academic advising that is the the Nakata journal and the mentor out of Pennsylvania State University since then there are two more journals that are focused on advising the the Nakata review and the journal of academic advising coming out of Indiana University so but taking those out of the of the mix because we would expect all those articles to be directly related there were 138 other journals that that published at least one article related specifically to academic advising and personal tutoring and of those you see that that 40 of them were disciplinary journals lots in nursing quite a bit in agriculture emerging in technology related journals but we find this quite fascinating and it serves to provide some fodder for future discussion about where the our literature is situated you can go the next one so really briefly we we tried to capture not only the topics of the journals of the articles but also the the nature of the article the the the research paradigms the methodologies the was there a survey instrument used you know lots of different information that we captured from them really are kind of first pass at the our continued pass at this revealed about two thirds of them were in the social sciences about a third of them were humanity oriented ones we know there there is an emerging call for arts based studies related to this or a new scholarly inquiry book that's that's coming out has an article a chapter on advising related research in the natural sciences for example and so the scope of paradigms and and designs and methodologies will continue to increase for sure next slide so beyond the research paradigms the the necata research committee some years ago established a research agenda framework through which existing in future advising related scholarship can be situated and there you see that across the top the three-legged stool made up of the impact of academic advising personal tutoring on usually focusing on students so work with students and think of the the first study we heard about today for example would be situated in that in that and about a third of the articles that we have analyzed fall into this category that that's about about students specifically and advisors work with students the secondary is the context of advising and personal tutoring and we've heard some of that here today also about 18% of the articles were in this area so this has to do with advising structures approaches how advising and tutoring is situated within higher and further and higher education institutions and that's really an interesting area as well and then the toughest thing to capture was the theoretical frameworks because virtually you know even if it's an impact study or a context study there is a theory involved and and so but there were many especially the humanities oriented ones that were were focused primarily on some use of some disciplinary theory within the context of advising and tutoring and so these are not mutually exclusive of course you're already thinking about challenging us in these but the the framework has worked well and continues to stand firm so all the articles you've been hearing about today will be added now to our ongoing database it'll be interesting in this case to compare how the research team would catalog each of your articles and how you and your author team would situate your work across the variables we're capturing so look for an email from me coming up that would be really interesting and so very briefly as I finish let me give you a peek of some major trends we've been seeing you can go next one of our conclusions quite honestly is is that the advice advising related to literature is still a mile wide and an inch deep while the topics across by now is over 800 articles because we continue to interrogate the the the literature for the articles that we're continuing to include in our database just not being studied into in this manuscript while the topics represent a wonderfully broad scope of areas it's challenging to pull them under relevant themes and buckets of topics as you can manage imagine but some of the areas identified here that you can see on the screen one thing we'd highlight is an overabundance of studies in the social sciences that focus on really indirect measures perceptions feelings reaction to services too many satisfaction studies in my humble opinion because advising in the tutoring is much more than satisfaction and customer oriented types of things we could get into that later and a fewer number that really focus on learning and given our collective advocacy for the pedagogies of advising and tutoring to promote learning we need a lot more scholarship in that area to be sure so we've identified a few emerging trends over the last few years in the data set obviously the use of technology was emerging even pre covid and that will likely eclipse the literature for the next couple years advising technologies have also promoted the use of predictive analytics using algorithms of metrics to predict future success and advisors and tutors are being asked to intervene intervene in some appropriate ways and quite frankly some frightening ways speaking of deficit focused formulas and labels like at risk advisors know that success is complex it's a complex construct that involves a lot more than standardized tests and scores and past grades so this is a critical area for future research you see some other areas of emerging focus one of which I'd highlight is the emergency of electronic journals like the frontiers in education journal so how academic writing sees the light of day in this area is is increasingly positive but also some cause for trepidation because as we've dug into those 138 academic journals beyond the advising focused ones it was clear that in many cases an advising related articles squeaked through as the only article of its type in that journal so the question is why you know is no one else writing in that area within that discipline or what is the gatekeeping issue with editors editorial boards that we that we need to address whose voices are not yet being heard and how can we continue to promote scholarship from practitioners those who are at the front lines of our work with students lots to talk about there but finally I get to my final slide here so we can get to questions the team needs to come to term that we need to put our arms around this current manuscript and finally hit print hopefully within the next two months that's our goal so we can launch this project to be much more public facing so the plan is to move these articles and the ones we've continued to gather into a searchable database that will then allow all of you and other scholars to dig deeper into this pool of work for secondary analysis for position papers that come from trends and gap analyses and professional development opportunities within advising units and across collaborative networks it'll be important continually and I know that you can't research committee under Catherine's leadership right now is is working on an agenda of diversity equity and inclusion type studies studies that use critical theory social justice to highlight the lived experiences of our students of complex identities are really important and to interrogate the systemic issues within higher education that we see so finally so more specifics most specifically this analysis of both content and context is serving for related purposes and and I know that you can now LVSA and Catherine's work in Australia and many other places across the globe are with us in this is to explore the evidence for academic advising as a field of inquiry we want to illuminate the heuristics of advising related inquiry if we consider this a profession as as Craig and others have stated in in a discipline to really promote the discourse that addresses the complexities of academic advising and personal tutoring and the research that that entails and then to is to establish a range of literature and point to the future of the scholarship of advising it and and really to promote scholarly advisors and scholarly personal tutors and related to us the type of pedagogical research that is is done in a lot of disciplines so I'll stop there I believe or we head back to Claire on this and ready for some interesting questions. Thanks so much. Thank you and thank you to all of our present presenters that was ever so interesting and I'm sure the presentations will provide some ideas for future developments amongst our members. We'll turn into the chat window now to take questions so if you have a question or an observation that you would like to make please do type it into there for the attention of the presenters. Thank you. We'll just give you a few moments to type in there. I think the pause on questions there is indicative of the thorough conversations that have been taken place by the authors there in the presentations. So there is a question here to Alison, was there a difference between the personal tutoring needs of students from individualistic countries versus kept this countries? I think so yeah I think the more collectivist ones were the ones that were more willing to talk to their own friends and family rather than to their tutors. This is something that I'm going to be exploring in a lot more detail. I didn't have that many from individuals individualistic countries in the actual interviews. A lot of them were from Southeast Asia and so they would be more collectivist in terms of they would go and talk to their friends or go and talk to their family before they would talk to a tutor about anything. But I'm just doing some research now on just Chinese students for a PhD that I'm going to be doing over the next couple of years. So I'm going to be looking into this a little more and about maybe why they feel more of an affinity with their home and their friends and their family. Maybe it's something cultural to like to do with the culturation. Perhaps they don't feel that they want to like separate from their home and from their home country and they feel that their support lies there. So this is an area that really I think needs exploring more. I wouldn't like to make any strong claims about it right now but it is something that yes I think there is but I would need to find more evidence about this. So I mean hopefully a bit later on down the line I can add a bit more to this conversation. Is that okay? Is there anything else? Thank you. We've had a comment in the chat box as well about capacity issues remain central to personal tutoring in HNUK and can professionalisation and scholarship fully address this. Would any of our presenters like to make a comment on this? Yes this is Wendy. I'll jump in really quickly on that because I'm really excited about that question. How we describe the work that we do and the aspirational work that we do is critical to the capacity issue and what we find at least in the States is that academic leadership rarely give agency to academic advisors and we would call personal tutors, faculty advisors in many cases. Rather don't give them agency to talk about the deeply complex issues that they work with every day. They want to see very simple metrics. They want to see retention numbers and graduation rates without giving space for the complexities of what goes into the binary one or zero that is did they stay or did they go? Did they graduate or did they not? The scholarship really needs to continue to get deeper and more complex and more substantially thick if you will and get into the hands of academic leaders. It could be that the COVID world I've been hearing from a lot of colleagues where the advising is being elevated because they are really the front line of their work with students right now so being able to capture that not only locally in your context but also within the literature is really important. Just to add to what Wendy was saying I've put a few comments in the chat bar in the UK particularly I feel that we just cannot not make space for this and the fact that some many institutions still have not timetabled or allowed space in the mainstream timetable for advising to happen sends a very strong message about its importance or lack of importance in achieving student success. In the editorial we were bringing together some very strong strands from the collection itself around the evidence, emerging evidence that student success relies very strongly on this relational pedagogic practice and I think for any decision makers out there in terms of looking at strategies that work mainstreaming advising giving it the space it deserves to thrive is a really important part of understanding what this sense of belonging is really all about so I think any evidence that we can provide about how advising contributes towards student success and one of the other parts of the student success ecosystem that advising touches is a really important part of our purpose I think in making sure that advising is mainstreamed and seen as a mainstreamed pedagogic practice. Thank you very much for that there's a few comments that are coming into our chat bar here but I think we're reaching the end of some of our specific questions now so thank you to everyone who attended today everyone for their comments on the chat and of course thank you to our authors and editorial team the ebook is available on the ucat website under the resources tab it's also been sent out to our registered attendees via email if you have any difficulties in accessing this then please do let us know please keep an eye on our major channels for further webinars and events and details of when booking on these is available enjoy the rest of your afternoon and goodbye