A Compelling Collaboration: The First Year Writing Program, Writing Center, and Directed Self-Placement

At Rhode Island College (RIC), Becky Caouette, Director of Writing, and Claudine Griggs, Writing Center Director, are invested in helping students become better writers. That’s our job, and our privilege. While we share this goal, we each work under markedly different institutional scaffolding. Perhaps nowhere was this difference more apparent than in our former writing placement testing process for RIC’s First Year Writing (FYW) courses, where all of the work was done by the writing center. In what follows, we talk about how the uneven work distribution provided the exigency to change our placement process, and how we turned to Directed Self-Placement (DSP) as a possible solution on two fronts: providing better placement procedures for our students and creating more egalitarian (and collaborative) working conditions between the writing center and the FYW Program.University Writing Cente

Work placement reports: Student perceptions

Engineering students complete work placement reports after being on placement in industry, the aim is to increase work place learning and to increase students understanding about the placement, themselves, career direction and skills obtained. Third and fourth year engineering students perceptions on their report writing experience, academic feedback quality, and the effect of completing work placement reports on their learning and report writing ability, were surveyed. Third year students enjoyed the experience more than fourth year students and perceived greater benefits. Fourth year student opinion was mixed, reflecting greater experience and cynicism. Fourth year students rated feedback from academics higher than the third years, perhaps because their reports were more interesting for the academics. The fourth year students were more cynical on the benefits of reflecting and reviewing what they had learned, and many considered this was not important for being an engineer

Unsung heroes: who supports social work students on placement?

Since the introduction of the three year degree programme in 2003, social work education has undergone a number of significant changes. The time students spend on placement has been increased to two hundred days, and the range of placement opportunities and the way in which these placements have been configured has significantly diversified. A consistent feature over the years, however, has been the presence of a Practice Educator (PE) who has guided, assessed and taught the student whilst on placement. Unsurprisingly, the role of the PE and the pivotal relationship they have with the student has been explored in the past and features in social work literature. This paper, however, concentrates on a range of other relationships which are of significance in providing support to students on placement. In particular it draws on research to discuss the role of the university contact tutor, the place of the wider team in which the student is sited, and the support offered by family, friends and others. Placements and the work undertaken by PE’s will continue to be integral to the delivery of social work education. It is, however, essential to recognise and value the often over looked role of others in providing support to students on placement

Providing work Placements for disabled students : a good practice guide for further and higher education institutions

"This document provides a guide to institutions’ duties in regard to work placements and offers practical advice on what institutions can do to ensure quality work placement opportunities for disabled students. It is aimed at institution staff responsible for placements: placement organisers, subject tutors and disability officers/learning support coordinators. It is not aimed at employers or students themselves" -- page 2

Optimizing The Spatial Content Caching Distribution for Device-to-Device Communications

We study the optimal geographic content placement problem for device-to-device (D2D) networks in which the content popularity follows the Zipf law. We consider a D2D caching model where the locations of the D2D users (caches) are modeled by a Poisson point process (PPP) and have limited communication range and finite storage. Unlike most related work which assumes independent placement of content, and does not capture the locations of the users, we model the spatial properties of the network including spatial correlation in terms of the cached content. We propose two novel spatial correlation models, the exchangeable content model and a Mat\'{e}rn (MHC) content placement model, and analyze and optimize the \emph{hit probability}, which is the probability of a given D2D node finding a desired file at another node within its communication range. We contrast these results to the independent placement model, and show that exchangeable placement performs worse. On the other hand, MHC placement yields a higher cache hit probability than independent placement for small cache sizes.Comment: appeared in Proc. IEEE Intl. Symposium on Info. Theory, Barcelona, Spain, July 201

Doing it differently

Purpose: Work-based learning is increasingly viewed as important in students’ higher education experiences. Drawing from the process of re-validating a Joint Honours in Education (JHE) programme, we highlight challenges involved in ensuring a meaningful placement experience for students that is fully embedded within their course. Primary challenges included the disparate number of subject strand combinations and concomitant career aspirations, wider university requisites on developing Graduate Attributes and student expectations of their placement opportunities. In broadening the scope and number of placement opportunities, we simultaneously increased our partnership links with employers to attract increased student buy-in to the opportunities available to them. Design/methodology/approach: This case study utilises staff reflections, stakeholder contributions and student evaluations to illuminate the process involved in re-validating a JHE programme to incorporate increased placement opportunities. A particular focus is placed on consideration of the tensions inherent within work based learning opportunities and the ways in which such experiences can be successfully embedded within a Higher Education (HE) degree programme. Whilst we are able to report on successful integration of placement opportunities in Year 1, we utilise student perspectives to gain understanding of the importance, or otherwise, they place on placements through the duration of their degree. Findings: Whilst placements are widely accepted as a positive feature of HE, inherent tensions emerged from some students who questioned the value and purpose of placements and time away from university. Conversely, employers saw placement and particularly the assessment of students whilst on placement as critical in students’ development into professional workers. The inclusion of placements in HE is therefore problematic, particularly in light of increased tuition fees. This case study however, suggests that meaningful and disparate placement opportunities can be successfully embedded within each year of an HE degree programme and can be viewed as enhancing the student academic experience. Research limitations/implications: The paper is located within a body of research that focuses positively on placement/work-based learning opportunities for undergraduate students, but does raise some emerging tensions linked to the marketization of HE and resulting student perspectives on ‘value’. Although generic themes can be applied to curriculum design elsewhere, outcomes may be different and linked to differing institutional habituses that influence practice. In addition, this paper reports solely on a single case that has developed a degree course to support the unique needs of its students within a particular context. Practical implications: The work-based learning model presented here facilitates student empowerment in tailoring their degree to their interests and career aspirations. It requires effective internal and external partnerships to inform curriculum design and the organization of placements. This paper will therefore be of interest to HE practitioners who are faced with the challenges of providing a broad range of placement opportunities for large and diverse groups of students with differing career aspirations. In addition, it will also be attractive to employers that have strong links with universities and are in the position to influence curriculum design. Social implications: The focus on employability and the development of key generic skills is interconnected with structures influencing social mobility. The range of students entering higher education and the concomitant expectations on their degree to have ‘value’ in the employment ‘market’ on graduation is becoming increasingly important - particularly for students categorized as widening participation. Offering increased opportunities for placements and linking assessment to work-based competencies can therefore be viewed as an integral part of HE’s responsibilities to students. Originality/value: This case study highlights the versatility of work-based learning that on one hand, requires the academy to embrace alternatives ways of learning, but on the other hand, creates new and innovative ways of engaging students. In addition and critically, it illuminates an approach to embedding work-based learning into an overarching degree structure that enables students to tailor their degree to their interests and career aspirations