2.4 Just engage! An eCampaign in a day
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2.4 Just engage! An eCampaign in a day
- 1. An eCampaign in a Day Teaching & Learning Conference 24 June 2016
- 2. Theory into Practice? “Student-led experiential exercise using agile learning techniques” ….or…
- 3. Just Engage: eCampaign in a day • Working with new people, new ideas • Putting theory into practice • Boosting employability, and ….A lot of fun
- 4. • Students get stuck in a rut • Group work is regimented • Assessment focus = limited appetite for risk • Experimentation is not encouraged • No opportunity to work with new people, across different disciplines The Challenge
- 5. Agile Learning • ‘Agile Teaching/Learning Methodology (ATLM) encourages communication, knowledge-sharing and the learning process to nurture self-learning individuals.’ • (W.Liu, et al, 2004)
- 6. Agile Learning Get Set Imple- ment Learn Evaluate
- 7. What’s an eCampaign? • A multimedia campaign drawing together the disciplines of advertising, public relations, marketing, media production, event management and content journalism • To meet a live client brief • And demonstrate that you can engage the target audience All in the space of a single day.
- 8. Meet The Client Magdelina Kitanova Video Message https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0kfMFB YxlU&feature=youtu.be
- 9. EU Referendum The biggest exercise in “public engagement” in the UK in 2016
- 11. Agile Process Align Get Set Implement Learning Evaluate Client Brief Research Pilot Edit User content SMART Teams form Planning On-going Adjustment Amplify Research Roles Taken Client Pitch Content capture Influencers Client reaction
- 12. The results @___csz has just pledged to vote. Will you? #JustEngageEvent #EveryVoteCounts https://vimeo.com/159805568
- 13. The agile process is not linear or sequential It is “iterative” What did we learn?
- 14. Will we do it again? • YES! • On 2 November 2016 • School of Business, Law & Communications “Enrichment Week” will offer an eCampaign in a day to students on Advertising, PR, Marketing, Media Production, Event Management • And demonstrate that you can engage your students, too. All in the space of a single day.
Editor's Notes
- Introductions: I am Catherine Sweet, I teach on the PR degrees at both undergraduate and masters level programmes. And this is Magdelina Kitanova, a graduate of both the undergraduate and MA PR degrees at SSU; she is now working on a PhD at the University of Southampton and working on an ESRC funded project into youth voter participation in the UK and elsewhere. She and I put on an event on the 21st of March this year. We have ten minutes to introduce you to a new approach to teaching. In pedagogic terms, you could describe it as “student led experiential exercise using agile learning techniques” So, it fits into a session that is all about theory into practice. Not only is it an example of applying a theory of teaching, but it is also an approach that you might want to consider using in your own work, to help students get an opportunity to put into practice what they have learned. Of course, I didn’t tell the students the top description, but I did send a special personal email invitation to students from three different degree programmes inviting them to participate in what was billed as the bottom description- an e campaign in a day.
- So, instead of telling students that it was a pedagogic experiment, I simply invited students from four different degree programmes to come together for a day long event- and made it a personal invitation to produce a campaign in a day. I left it purposefully vague- they were not told much about it, apart from the above three bullet points. So, what was I attempting to achieve by breaking with the normal approach to teaching within a degree programme?
- The difficulty in most degree programmes is that by the third year, group working is cliqueish- and rigid- meaning that established roles and approaches are not challenged. The “leaders” are known; the slackers and the non-engaged just go along for the ride. Getting students engaged when there is NO assessment involved is harder for the established teacher- routines are ingrained and hard wired by then. The ecampaign in a day and its use of agile learning is a way to shake all that up, because none of the above applies. Students are split up and forced to work in groups where they don’t know each other, and they are forced to take decisions on their own- no teacher is telling them what to do or how to do it. No rules, no marks. It’s a form of organised chaos. So, what is the approach called “Agile Learning”?
- It was a model created in the software development world, where teams are brought together to develop solutions to problems. It is a non-hierarchical approach to group problem solving.
- It was actually created in the software development world, where teams are brought together to develop solutions to problems. It is a non-hierarchical approach to group problem solving. A five step process. If that is the underlying framework, what did we ask the students to do?
- The goal was to challenge the students to build such a campaign in the space of a single day in a way that engaged the target audience- not just one way promotion!
- I was the client with the live brief. I wasn’t actually able to attend on the day, because I was at a conference in Brighton- on Political research, so I pre-recorded a video message that told the students what I was looking for. I won’t play this- because it is about six minutes long! Given that my area of interest is youth engagement in political activities- especially voting- I chose the most obvious topic:
- I asked the teams to prepare a multimedia campaign designed to promote youth engagement in the EU referendum. The target audience was 18 to 24 year olds, in the Southampton area, who are eligible to register or who are already registered to vote in the UK. This specifically excludes students or other people in this age bracket who are EU citizens or overseas citizens who do not have the right to vote in this referendum. An important point -the campaign had to be neutral! It could not take sides on whether the UK should remain or leave the EU. It wasn’t about promoting a particular view; it’s to make sure that votes were cast. As part of that campaign, they were also tasked with running a “pilot exercise” on the day to demonstrate that their proposed campaign could deliver measureable success. The teams had to measure that success and prepare a presentation at the end of the day that was emailed to me, for feedback.
- I also made clear to the students that I would be measuring success not just in terms of promotion. I also wanted them to test another element of theory- the engagement ladder. This is something that I have developed – a theoretical model- in my undergraduate and MA degree dissertations. So, they had to deliver something that would change people’s behaviour.
- Before they started, this was the map of their work that we thought they would follow- but we didn’t impose any structure on the process. We wanted to see if they would come up with it themselves- by applying the general AGILE theory to the campaign process. For the rest of the day, we watched the teams at work, with two academics who were ethnographic researchers- participant observers- they could not lead or “teach”; their role was to observe and record the process, following a research guide. So, what actually happened?
- Results: Two excellent social media based campaigns were piloted to demonstrate effectiveness- they built the Facebook sites, ran twitter and Instagram accounts and one group did a video. We were impressed by the professionalism of the outputs- and the high degree of student engagement they got- a lot of which was used as content in their campaigns. The team dynamic processes were observed, strengths & weaknesses identified The results showed high creativity, but there were weaknesses in their research skills Pressure created real excitement, but the high level of engagement can lead to stress at times. Student participant feedback was excellent They Had fun Learned from each other about different ways of doing things Took responsibility Got high levels of engagement from other students at the university What did we learn about Agile teaching?
- Iterative learning is a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result- and that’s what happened. Students did tend to skimp on the first two elements- the alignment (getting group roles sorted and agreement on how the team would work) and the Getting Set- doing the research needed. When the implementation showed the weaknesses of both teams in these areas, then the teams had to go back and do more Alignment and Getting Set. In short, the Leaning step forced them to go back. And the Evaluation also informed their learning- they couldn’t leave it to the end. So rather than a linear sequential process, it is much looser, with continuous feedback loops needed to get closer and closer to the goal. Agile techniques work, but more attention needs to be paid about how learning is something that happens all the way along- and that making mistakes in a “risk free” environment is really, really important. The “what would you do differently now that you know” part of the session was crucial- and taught them more than any normal class room activity.