How the community have been using Talis Elevate: Nina Walker, University of Hertfordshire

Nina Walker joined us for a webinar to talk about her use of Talis Elevate in the Master of Pharmacy programme.

Nina is a Student Experience Lead at the University of Hertfordshire and leads a module in the first year called ‘Transition into Higher Education’ which has 130 students.

Nina provided some context about her cohort:

• Typically 20-40% of students are first in the family to attend university
• 40% don’t speak English as a first language
• The goal of the module is to work on the students’ academic transition and building confidence

Talis Elevate has given an opportunity to provide different ways to encourage students and build confidence in communication and verbalising skills, Nina told us. Particularly with the remote learning challenges of Covid19, it was important to find a way to work collaboratively together.

One of the projects that Nina ran with her students was an academic writing skills session. It was done synchronously, within a live workshop session. and prepared an example essay in advance and had students break into groups and go through it together. Students were asked to identify writing errors or critique the work and provide a mark for the essay. This allowed students to better understand their own work, but also experience the way that others in their cohort work.

Nina said “I have really enjoyed using Talis Elevate. It has been great for me to be able to involve students, particularly in the current situation. The benefits for me have been around the ability for students to comment in an anonymous manner, which helps them build confidence… which is my real driver for using this. ”

“It helps us make them feel supported in the programme. It allows the ‘silent student’ to be able to interact but also to learn from each other. It has given me an opportunity to give it in lots of different ways.”

Nina also told us about how she engaged students on a task aimed at building their ethical framework. She introduced a fitness to practice case to students using Talis Elevate. This was done in a synchronous workshop setting, Nina added prompts along the document and asked students to add their thoughts.

It was a useful way for students to start thinking about how these ethical standards affect pharmacy professionals, and how they can start developing their own ethical framework. It also allowed them to see how others in their cohort interpret behaviours.

Nina told us this was a successful task as it encouraged them to read and interpret a document that previously would not have been engaged with much due to its long and technical nature.

You can find out more about the other projects that Nina ran with her students, such as a medical terms glossary, in the video below:

Thanks very much to Nina for sharing her experience of Talis Elevate. To see more Talis Elevate academic user stories, click here.

If you’d like to learn more about the ways other academics are using Talis Elevate, join our community discussion group on Microsoft Teams. Sign up here.