An exploration into the use of the digital platform Slack to support group assessments and feedback and the impact on engagement - Working Paper

Funded by Teaching Innovation Project (DMU)Assessment and feedback is consistently highlighted as an area where students feel Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) could improve and regularly scores lowest of the key criteria for student satisfaction (Grove, 2014). Furthermore, group assessment, where students not only need to learn assessment requirements, but also social skills required to work collaboratively (Reiser, 2017), can create additional challenges. The majority of university students have grown up as digital natives, with 81% of students reporting use of mobile devices whilst studying (Al-Emran, Elsherif & Shaalan, 2016). There is a requirement to consider more brave and innovative technological approaches to supporting students. This working paper explores whether adopting an industry tool Slack, a Computer-Mediated Communication platform, can be an effective tool in group assessments. More specifically, can Slack facilitate an innovative and collaborative group learning community for mediating and supporting group assessments amongst level 5 undergraduate marketing students and additionally develop graduate competencies. Proposing a programme of qualitative inquiry, using a multi-method case study approach, data will be collected through six focus groups of 8-10 students and two semi-structured individual interviews with members of the teaching team in order to evaluate the use of Slack in supporting and engaging students in group assessments

A Multidimensional Szemer\'edi Theorem in the primes

Let $A$ be a subset of positive relative upper density of \PP^d, the $d$-tuples of primes. We prove that $A$ contains an affine copy of any finite set F\subs\Z^d, which provides a natural multi-dimensional extension of the theorem of Green and Tao on the existence of long arithmetic progressions in the primes. The proof uses the hypergraph approach by assigning a pseudo-random weight system to the pattern $F$ on a $d+1$-partite hypergraph; a novel feature being that the hypergraph is no longer uniform with weights attached to lower dimensional edges. Then, instead of using a transference principle, we proceed by extending the proof of the so-called hypergraph removal lemma to our settings, relying only on the linear forms condition of Green and Tao