This summer, the Digitally Ready project team are carrying out a research study to find out how effective our work placements are at helping students become digitally ready for the future.
Our fabulous work placement student Rachel Glover has been busy talking to academic staff and employers who have experience of receiving Reading students on work placements. Here is Rachel’s first update – in suitably digital format!
Transcript:
Music intro.
[Text on screen: JISC logo, University of Reading logo.
Digitally Ready for the Future
JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme]
Rachel Glover: Hello, My name is Rachel Glover and I am a second year undergraduate student at the University of Reading. I am studying Politics and International Relations and I am going to be working with the Digitally Ready project team throughout the summer and in the autumn term.
[Text on screen “Rachel Glover Undergraduate student”]
[Images on screen include Rachel talking to camera, and shots of academics and students in industrial and work settings, as well as at the university, including lab work, cow sheds, botany, archaeology etc.]
I am going to be talking to various academics who have actually supervised students on their placements and I am also going to employers to talk to them about the students that they have taken on to do work placements within a company. And I have also spoken to a few PhD students, interviewing them all about digital skills that they have required for placements, what the student has done throughout their placement, how they have enhanced their digital skills and their understanding of digital literacies.
So far throughout my interviews I’ve actually started to come up with some common themes I’ve heard from different people that I’ve spoken to. One of the first ones would be that a lot of people are feeling about the placements, are actually too short, so they’re spending a lot of time with the student training them on how to use certain software technology and then, you know, it’s not actually long enough for the student to use the skills that they’ve built up , so I think in the future we might have to think about having longer placement times so that students can get a full use of the skills that they have learned.
[More images of lab work and people using computers & shots of the museum and lectures]
What I’ve also found by speaking to employers and academics is that the placements actually help students to acquire skills that actually going to be really vital for them when they go into industry and these placements help them bridge the gap between the studying that they are doing on their degree programme and then when they go in to the industry or employment and see the work environment, it helps to understand how these skills can actually be used.
This also helps the University gain a wider perspective of what skills students should be taught throughout their time at university, so it helps us to know which skills we should be teaching to students, so that when they do go for employment or in to industry, they’ll be ready.
[Fade]
[Text on screen: http://www.reading.ac.uk/digitallyready%5D
[Text on screen: University of Reading logo]