Author: heidiprobst

It is estimated by emarketer that around 1.75 billion people worldwide are using smartphones, with the trajectory of smartphone use expected to continue to increase. Currently a quarter of the world’s population uses a smartphone at least once a month. Six in ten adults in the UK now use a smartphone according to the 2014 Ofcom report on media use. Of these smartphone users the majority are 25-34 year olds and 45-54 year olds. Even activity by those aged 65-74 has increased since 2012 when around 12% of this age category was using smart devices; activity has risen to 20% in 2014. Of those that use smartphones 48% report downloading apps and on average have 23 apps on their devices of which they use 10 on a regular basis.

So with the majority of the UK population now regular smartphone users it is not surprising that many educators are now utilising this technology for delivering information, and communicating with students. The Jisc mobile learning infokit introduces three frameworks that educators may want to consider when operationalising the use of mobile technology as a learning tool (Laurillard 2002, Park 2011, Koole 2009).

We have been trialling using mobile technology to enhance research skills in the Allied Health Professions (AHP) department. Using the MyKnowledgeMap (MKM) MyProgress app we have developed a series of 9 tasks (see table 1) for masters students to work through to take them from an initial research idea to a full research proposal that is ready for submission for governance approval processes.

Table 1 the Tasks used in the AHP Research app

Rather than using one of the frameworks identified by Jisc we have opted to deliver the research tasks through an intrapreneurial lens utilising an intrapreneurial pedagogy developed through a small Higher Education Funded research project⁽¹⁾. The pedagogy fosters learning by doing, learning by networking, learning from mentors and role models, learning from mistakes and learning from challenging tasks as a way of developing the relevant skills required to innovate within the work organisation where the student is employed; developing intrapreneurial skills through the context of their research dissertation.

So why use a smartphone app and not traditional e-learning platforms such as Blackboard and Pebblepad? Our post graduate students primarily are employed and are working mostly full time with no access to Blackboard and other e-learning platforms during working hours because of access to PCs in hospital departments. Even those that do have access to a PC can’t access traditional e-learning platforms because NHS firewalls prohibit website access to many traditional websites, and gaining the relevant access for specific users is problematic. We have found seven key benefits for using the MKM app with our PG students:

1. Retaining contact and engagement with students that are out on placement (or at work) where the place of work has no Wi-Fi.

The MKM app works without the need for Wi-Fi. Students can download the app and all the tasks while at home or in a Wi-Fi enabled environment and work on the app tasks offline, simply synchronising the app once they are back in a Wi-Fi enabled area perhaps as they pass a Wi-Fi enabled café on their way home.

2.     Engaging students beyond the classroom.

Using the app enables learning to take place beyond the confines of the physical or virtual classroom, at any time when learning opportunities arise.

3.     Allows a student to be the orchestrator of their own learning, bringing in relevant stakeholders where appropriate.

The app and the tasks as they are designed encourage students to gain feedback from a range of stakeholders that they choose based on their own project and work situations. Stakeholders for our students can be colleagues, managers or patients/clients. For example, students are encouraged to present their research idea to a user forum (patient representative group) where direct feedback about the topic and study design can be gained from those present by handing the student’s smart device to a member of the audience and asking them to complete a short feedback form. This immediate feedback is recorded and captures important patient perspective that can inform and enhance the design of the study.

4.     Tutors can see at a glance how individual students on a cohort are progressing with tasks and activities.

Tutors either at the work site or at the University access the MKM app webpage where they can see all student activity, enabling tutors to monitor individual progression. It makes it possible to take early intervention where it is seen that a student maybe struggling and not meeting targets. Tutors can feedback directly on individual tasks providing immediate support, encouragement and advice where necessary, providing valuable links to the University. The student receives the tutor feedback each time they synchronise their app when in a Wi-Fi area.

5.     Students can monitor their own progress.

The framework of the app allows students to monitor their own progress seeing how much or how little they still need to achieve before they reach the stage where their work is ready for submission (ie all tasks are completed to a sufficient standard).

6.     Allows connections between university working and placement staff and placement learning.

The app enables better connections between University learning and real life work situations. It also provides an opportunity if required for work mentors to feed in reports on task achievements, providing a multi-faceted approach to student support.

7.     Facilitates the opportunity for stakeholder input and feedback on student work.

In the moment reflections can be recorded on the student’s smart device, simplifying the process for key stakeholders who need to provide input or feedback. The student simply hands over the smart device to the stakeholder who completes the feedback form at the point of the activity; this is invaluable for busy clinicians or staff who don’t have time to leave the clinical department to find an office and a PC in order to write and e-mail formal feedback to a student.

Why should you consider using the MKM MyProgress app?

The majority of our students now own and use a smart device and are comfortable with the technology, using it for communicating, shopping and gaming; the next natural extension for these users is to support their University learning. Accessing activities or messages from University tutors via their phone means students can feel connected to their learning in the same way they feel connected to their friends via Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Being able to engage students beyond the classroom within a placement environment serves to authenticate and situate learning in real life scenarios enabling the learning to have greater impact.

As the majority of students are already using this technology it becomes a missed opportunity if tutors avoid engaging with smartphone technology as a platform for learning. The impact of exploiting mobile learning in the workplace via the MKM MyProgess app, particularly in relation to the 7 points above, is currently being evaluated. A future blog post will discuss the outcomes of this evaluation.

Acknowledgement to @cyclingbob1 who helped write this blog post.

This year I was fortunate enough to be nominated and subsequently awarded an Inspirational Research Supervisor Award by my University. What is lovely about receiving such an accolade is that your research students are the ones that nominate you. One hundred and forty six nominations were received this year from approximately 700 research degree students of which only five supervisors received the Inspirational Research Supervisors Award- and I was one of those lucky five.

After the initial shock and usual worry that they may have made a mistake and got the wrong ‘Heidi’ (there are two of us in my Faculty I often receive the other Heidi’s e-mails by mistake). I started to think:

“Well this means I’m doing something right, right?”

I know what I’m doing, but I’m not sure I know which bit of what I’m doing inspires and encourages my students.

“I’m not lost for I know where I am. But, however where I am maybe lost”
A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Poo

The thing is, being called an inspirational researcher supervisor felt somewhat alien. Mainly because most of the time after each supervisory session with a student I question:

• Am I doing this right?
• I’m following my instinct and my experience as a PhD student, but am I correct to do this?
• I’m also following my instinct as a trained healthcare professional with twelve years of hard labour in the NHS, and using all my inbuilt empathy, leadership, motivational and coaching techniques, but do these work?
• Do my students’ learn and develop from our one to one discussions?
• Do my students feel motivated, and enthused when they leave a supervisory session? Or do they feel despondent, deflated and mentally drained?

The list of questions to self is endless.

So what does being an Inspirational teacher mean? What aspect of the relationship I have with my students is the part they find most helpful and uplifting? Or more importantly what should I be doing in the future to make sure my students always feel inspired?

Being awarded with this title comes with an invitation to attend a number of events, a faculty celebration, a University dinner for awardees and presentation at the annual graduation award ceremony, not to mention lots of photos. The best thing about attending these award ceremonies is the opportunity to listen to comments made by students about other award holders. It is a truly uplifting experience to realise the impact that tutors/teachers/educators (what ever your preference is for the title) have on the lives of their students. I felt humbled to be in the company of individuals who could inspire their students to learn, give students an opportunity to develop in their chosen professional field, and encourage them to grow as human beings. So as someone fairly new to higher degree research supervision I really started to think about the pedagogy for successful research supervision. I have completed the Institutional research supervisor’s course, I know the procedures and the regulations, but what are the successful pedagogies for research supervision? So I undertook a small search of the literature.

I was delighted when my searching led me to a report from the Department of Education, Science and Training of the Australian Government on ‘The Pedagogy of Good PhD Supervision’. Unfortunately the ‘good’ in this report relates primarily to timely PhD completions. While timely completions are advantageous to the University, as a metric they say little about the whole student experience and the knowledge development that the student has attained during their PhD journey. Surely ‘good’ supervisors want their students to complete in a timely way but to also gain positively in both knowledge and skills during the process. Nonetheless, Sinclair in this 2004 report identified a ‘hands on’ supervisory approach as a key characteristic of supervisors where students complete in a timely way. The ‘hands on’ approach (as opposed to a ‘hands off’ approach where students are left largely to their own devices) assists students to negotiate the PhD journey, by providing a structure to the PhD period. Most importantly it seems to me is that in this process of providing structure ‘hands on’ supervisors build relationships with their students. Part of this relationship building includes development of agreement of expectations between candidate and supervisor and develops trust. Where there is trust in the relationship the student feels able to approach the supervisor with confidence and the supervisor is more able to identify when it is appropriate to intervene or refer the student to others with specialist skills.

In addition, Sinclair (2004) identifies some other key strategies of the ‘hands on’ supervisor in the first year of canditure that leads to successful student progression:

• Engaging students with other students in face-to-face and online cohorts.
• Integrating the student into the supervisor’s broader research networks and research groups.
• Developing the professional development of the student via support for preparation of conference papers and publications.
• Encouraging frequent writing with rapid supervisor feedback.

These are useful strategies to employ, and I would say I employ all of these already. So in order to better understand what it means to be a good supervisor I’ve also been reading Pat Thomson’s blog ‘patter’ which I have found enormously helpful.

There are several useful posts on patter about the supervisory learning curve, particularly a guest post by Eva Bendix Petersen on ‘Learning to supervise: from training to pedagogy’. Her comments about what is generally missing from institutional supervisory courses resonate, what is missing is “conversations about pedagogy”. While Sinclair’s extensive research highlighted the importance of a ‘hands on’ approach with some specific strategies that are useful in the first year of study, the pedagogical picture presented in his report seems to be lacking a holistic element, holistic in the medical sense that is. For example, where do we consider the individual preferences and different approaches to learning of the student themselves?

In a different post in this series on supervision on ‘patter’- “supervision as an ethic of care” there is examination of care as a construct within the context of a supervisory relationship. Through theoretical examination it is proposed that supervision is seen as a caring encounter where both parties should benefit and both parties should contribute. The reciprocity is developed by 4 elements:
• Modeling- demonstrated materially.
• Dialogue- not just a statement of expectations but an explicit discussion of the care-full supervisory relationship.
• Practice- care like any other skill needs to be practiced and develops over time.
• Confirmation- supervisors like good teachers should emphasise the positive, confirming the students’ positive attributes, skills and potential.

This proposition of a caring relationship along with a framework of strategies such as those identified in the work of Sinclair (2004), feels like a more appropriate pedagogy to positively enhance the likelihood of a timely completion while maximising a student’s capabilities and fostering the opportunity for self-actualisation (Maslow 1971)

Now What?

While there is some research and some theorising about what makes a more successful or positive PhD experience for students I still felt like I needed to understand what my students want, what they like about my supervisory approach and what they feel they aren’t getting? So I asked my students to complete an anonymous survey; the results are unlikely to be generalizable, but here’s the crux of what they thought.
They agreed they had:
1. Sufficient contact to enable progression.
2. Sufficient support to allow goals to be met.
3. Enough feedback received to allow progression and
4. Rapid turnaround of feedback.
Interestingly here are some of their thoughts on what they feel helps:
5. Having a structured plan helps them keep to timescales, with regular prompts from the supervisor encouraging the student to keep to the plan.
6. Having a supervisor that is readily available.
7. Feedback given in a positive way that doesn’t overwhelm them.
8. Knowing the supervisor cares about their project.
9. Being challenged.
10. A supervisor that instils confidence.
11. Encouragement.
12. Confirmation that they may not get it right to start with but that very few students do.
13. Permission to fail and
14. Sometimes a kick up the bum!
Some of the comments made by my students in many ways replicate some of the statements made by intrapreneurs in a small study we conducted a few years ago (The 2INSPIRE project). An intrapreneur is someone who innovates within an existing organisation, developing and implementing novel solutions to organisational problems. Intrapreneurs that we interviewed also talked about failure, about confidence (or more specifically about self-efficacy) and about constantly being challenged in order to learn and grow. This makes total sense when you consider that research, specifically at PhD level is about innovating albeit at the apprenticeship level; PhD students maybe viewed as intrapreneurs/entrepreneurs in training. Hence it maybe appropriate to implement an intrapreneurial enhanced pedagogy for research supervision that I already adopt to help develop intrapreneurial behaviours in a traditional taught Masters module.

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
Maya Angelou

Moving forward
Is there pedagogy for research supervision that enables the student to complete in a timely fashion but that also meets the individual student’s needs for personal growth and fulfillment? Based on the discussion above I propose the following 3-point plan as a starting point in formulating pedagogy for research supervision:

1. A structured ‘hands on’ approach specifically in the first year (with an opportunity for the student to develop writing skills early on with constructive, rapid feedback).
2. Building a care-full relationship with the student in order to nurture student potential and the opportunity for growth. A supervisor that cares about the student’s project, is encouraging and supportive, makes themself available for the students, and helps build self-efficacy.
3. If you consider doctoral research as an apprenticeship for entrepreneurialism/intrapreneurialism then the student should experience challenge, should be given permission to fail (with opportunities to learn from failure in a supportive environment), have opportunities to build resilience, opportunities to learn from mentors and role models and be exposed to collaborative research to develop key skills relevant to post-doctoral career pathways.

In another blog (Mobile Learning: 7 key benefits of the MyKnowledgeMap mobile app and why you should consider using it) a colleague and I discuss a method to provide structure for students developing a research proposal through the platform of mobile technology. This short programme maybe easily adapted for use in the first year of a research degree, providing appropriate structure and the opportunity for rapid feedback beyond the confines of the supervisory session. Building opportunities within the PhD tenure for the student to develop entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial skills will enhance the possibility of the candidate surviving within a research career beyond the completion of the PhD. Utilising opportunities for learning from mistakes, learning from role models, peers and mentors and continually setting challenging tasks to take the student outside their comfort zone, may enable entrepreneurial skill development alongside the PhD. Providing an environment where the student can model resilient behaviours needed by long-term researchers (and by successful intra/entrepreneurs) may additionally prepare the student for post-doc research and beyond.

The hardest aspect of the three-point plan above I suspect is getting the right balance of care in the PhD student-tutor relationship this quote from Gwen Boyle struck me:

“The ideal supervisor has infinite time and unparalleled knowledge. She is patient and always available; she is understanding and constantly supportive.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t exist.”
Gwen Boyle

This is true, academics have many other competing priorities (funded research, teaching, team leader responsibilities to name a few) hence as supervisors we need to balance the needs of the student with the need (and requirement) to keep abreast of our own research and teaching commitments. While we don’t have infinite time as supervisors we can provide structure for our PhD students (especially in the first year), we can enter into a care-full relationship with the student, and ensure the student is exposed to experiences that may enhance entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial skills, maybe this will allows us to be inspirational research supervisors more of the time.

The one disadvantage of being given the award of Inspirational Research Supervisor is the photographs; there are lots of them. For those of us that are camera shy this is an appreciated but painful chore. In particular, it took the poor photographer an hour to capture a decent image for this board that is displayed at the entrance to the main building of the University. I think it was a hard day at the office for him and each time I pass this board I do cringe somewhat. However, the quote beneath the image from one of my students, well that always makes me smile.

 This is my first blog post and maybe an odd place to start but learning is chaotic so maybe it’s as good a place to start as any. 

In order to learn we often have to step outside our comfort zone. In the last two weeks I’ve been so far outside my comfort zone I almost needed a sat nav to find my way back. The problem with being out of your comfort zone is often that is the trigger for our personal demons to make an unwelcome appearance.  Those that know me are aware in my spare time I practice martial arts (karate to be specific). Only this week my instructor was telling some junior competitors about the demons that can suddenly appear when you take that long walk up to the mat for your fight.

I’ve been there myself, you look across the mat to your opponent and in an instance any personal self doubts you may have about your ability are transformed through your thought processes to create a distorted image of your opponent; depicting them as superhuman, and of gigantic proportions. All of a sudden  they’re twice your height and width, you look at the length of their arms the size of their fists and in a split second you have created  in your mind someone that is unbeatable and you’ve talked yourself out of winning before the fight has even started. You become unable to fight or use the skill you know you have, you crave to be back in your comfort zone ( in your head you’re wishing you were in your PJs watching telly at home) and as you try fighting with the equivalent of a car hand brake half engaged,  your demons win the fight. 

In life people talk about facing your demons. For a child of the seventies that spent her youth watching Dr Who from behind the sofa, having to face up to my demons seems a bit brutal and frankly scary and it also implies an element of confrontation with oneself. So I’ve decided maybe what I need to do instead is simply unmask the demons- just like in Scooby-Doo it’s bound to be the caretaker or some pesky kids- right?

So what are my demons, well someone close to me told me I’m a perfectionist (I’ve known that for some time). The point he was making was that this often means I worry a lot about whether my performance (whatever the setting) is going to be good enough. If you allow it (and I have on many occasions) this can be disabling, destructive and exhausting.

So how do you un-mask your demons and stop them from holding you back? Well there are a few strategies I’ve learned from my karate instructor and from intrapreneurs I’ve spoken to through my research.

• Prepare well– good fighters put in hours of hard training in the dojo ( the training room), this means when they step onto the mat they know they’re not going to be faced with anything harder than they have already faced in training; giving a sense of reassurance. Similarly, research the topic or field well so that you are unlikely to be unnerved by anything that is likely to be thrown at you in a key meeting or at a presentation.
• Rehearse – fighters practice their competition techniques over and over again until they become automatic. The purpose being that in the middle of a fight when the opponent initiates an attack they react to counter the attack instantly, without thinking and with precision. If you’re presenting on a new topic or leading a discussion forum or meeting rehearsing the content until its automatic can mean you expend less energy worrying about what you need to say next and can concentrate your efforts on other activities ( in my case trying not to fall off the lecture podium).
• Stick with what you know works– out on the competition mat is no place to try a new move for the very first time, unless the strategy is to use this encounter as a test bed for a more important meet. If you’re presenting at a major conference or biding for a new contract or funding, using a formula or plan that’s worked before can add an element of security.
• Teamwork – when you see an athlete win a medal what you may not see is the huge support team behind them that helped them get there; nutritionists, physiologists, technical experts oh and don’t forget the mums and dads (who hold very important team roles). Intrapreneurs I’ve spoken to in my research spoke repeatedly about the importance of bringing the team along with them. Your team holds expertise or perspectives you may not have and it’s important to recognise that and make sure they come along with you as part of the journey.

So now when I find myself out of my comfort zone and the demons start to appear I try to remember:

my opponent ( the audience, the company CEO) may be big and scary, but they’re human and vulnerable just like the rest of us. They may come with an impressive reputation, but it’s what happens in the here and now that matters at this moment. I remember I’ve  prepared for this, I’ve put in the training, there is nothing they can throw at me that I’ve not handled before. I’m  ready, there’s no need to panic my team are behind me all the way, and when the time is right I’ll hit them with the best of what I’ve got. Whether I win the funding bid or I get a standing ovation for a conference presentation ( that never happens by the way) is not really important (although the boss would probably say otherwise). What’s important is that the demons don’t win, because they will only grow stronger and more disabling. So here’s to unmasking demons- and let the fight begin!