Tag Archives: access and engagement

An introduction to Birkbeck with Access and Engagement

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In this blog, Ali Dunk an Access Officer shares how the Access and Engagement Department welcomed new students to the College during an online event.

At the beginning of September 2021, the Access and Engagement (A&E) Department invited students across its various programmes to take part in a two-part online Orientation event, aimed at preparing them for taking their first steps at Birkbeck. The sessions were led by both A&E staff members and current Birkbeck students and covered topics such as How do Seminars Work? Learning Online and What Support does Birkbeck Offer? All students who had engaged with Access and Engagement initiatives were invited, including students from the On Track programme as well as scholars coming to Birkbeck through The Compass Project and the Camden Scholarship.

The first session saw attendees take part in a mock seminar, centred around watching a short video before being spilt into breakout rooms to discuss what they had watched. This allowed them to get a feel for university teaching and learning in a safe and supportive environment as well as creating a sense of community with their fellow students. The second session set up a Q&A that allowed them to ask questions to current Birkbeck students, which ranged from requesting advice on time management and handling workload, all the way to asking about how to sign up to clubs and societies. As always, our incredible Team Birkbeck ambassadors gave informative and thoughtful answers which helped to assuage many of the students’ pre-term worries. Common themes emerged, with many of the attendees bringing up concerns about the concept of blended learning, alongside questions about the personal tutor system and contacting academic departments.

Across the two sessions student engagement was excellent and the team used a number of online methods to gain feedback and give students the opportunity to contribute. The increased confidence in using Microsoft Teams to engage with teaching and learning was clear as the sessions progressed, effectively preparing students for online elements of their courses.

The Access and Engagement Department will be running a programme of outreach activity with both current and prospective students across the academic year, with an Is University for Me? event planned for January 2022. For more information about our work and how to get involved, colleagues can email the team.

Further information:

 

 

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Collaborating with east London’s university community

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Hester Gartrell, Senior Outreach and Access Officer for Stratford discusses the East London Collaboration Day that she organised with universities operating in east London. She also discusses the onus behind creating the East London Widening Participation Forum. 

While many might be used to universities coming together to recruit students at Higher Education Fairs, on the 25 February we brought universities together for a slightly different reason. 

Rather than just showcasing the courses offered by different universities, the East London Universities Collaboration Day aimed to make educational professionals working in schools, colleges and other organisations more aware of the outreach and widening participation offer available from universities based in east London.  

We all know that with increasing workloads and lots of things to juggle, it can often be difficult for teachers or other educational professionals to know who to contact at a university. Bring into the mix that universities have different specialties and their access work might focus on different groups and you have a situation where education professionals want to engage their students with the idea of university but don’t know where to start.  

This event that I set up and run in partnership with China Anya, Senior Outreach Officer at Loughborough University of London aimed to address this by giving people the opportunity to find out about the different universities specialities and meet face to face with widening participation teams. Attendees had the chance to network with universities and hear more about their outreach work, as well as take part in a workshop and panel session which covered topics such as student wellbeing, part-time study and funding options.  

Ten universities attended including established east London Higher Education institutions such as Queen Mary and the University of East London, and more recent arrivals to the area including Loughborough, Coventry and Staffordshire Universities.  

The day was part of a wider initiative, the East London Widening Participation Forum that was set up in 2019 as part of the Access and Engagement Department’s outreach work in the Borough of Newham.  

It’s important that universities work together to help those who face barriers to accessing higher education. With lots of universities coming to east London as part of developments such as the Olympic park, 2019 seemed like the perfect time to bring established east London universities and more recent arrivals together. The aim of the forum is to see how we can work in partnership to help east Londoners take advantage of the activities and information about Higher Education offered by our forum’s members – who are right on their doorstep! 

We’re looking forward to seeing where the forum goes from here and are definitely hoping to run more workshops and events. We had over 30 professionals come along to the event and feedback from attendees has been great. There’s clearly an appetite for universities to come together and share their knowledge and expertise in a collaborative way. 

 

 

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