Every year, the Library & Study Advice teams run a week of support sessions for Postgraduate students approaching their Masters Dissertations: this year a comprehensive series of in-person and online sessions ran from Monday 3rd – Friday 7th March.

Postgraduate students are often only studying at Reading for a single academic year. While some may have very recently studied for their Undergraduate degree, others may have had a break from academic study or joined from a different University with very different digital skills experiences. A masters dissertation is also an opportunity to carry out individual research, in an area of specific interest – but perhaps using new techniques and tools.

I was able to join the programme with two short sessions on digital skills – thinking about digital proficiency and productivity, I designed two sessions to introduce some simple but sometimes overlooked features of MS Word and Excel. These would be of use to students completing a dissertation for the first time, who were unfamiliar with a lot of the features in these programs:

  • Headings and styles
  • Automatic Table of Contents
  • Captions and automatic Table of Figures
  • Table formatting and Excel worksheet organisation
  • Pivot tables and charts

 

19 students attended the session on MS Word, and 11 attended the session on MS Excel – it was great to see students engaging with these workshops, and in the sessions students reported that they were not frequent users of the programs. This was good, as it meant that the sessions were aimed at the right level – students who had basic familiarity who wanted to know more in order to improve their skills.

We also used these sessions to raise awareness of LinkedIn Learning – a subscription resource providing online tutorials and videos on a range of digital and workplace skills, including use of MS Word and Excel. The aim of the sessions was not only to introduce students to some simple but effective functions, but to pique their interest to learn more and use this platform.

Student feedback was positive – those who commented said that the sessions were clear and helpful, and that they had started to use some of the new knowledge they had gained from the workshop. Students were able to sign into LinkedIn Learning as part of the session, and while it would be good to offer a longer session to allow for more exploration – this is a good start and will help students on the road to developing their skills.

Slides from all of the sessions are available on the Library’s Kickstart your Masters Dissertation 2025 guide – please feel free to share with your students if any of these sessions would be of interest. For more information on Digital Capabilities, please contact Kim.

print & pdf