JISC

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This project developed a personalised learning community, in which dynamic intelligent knowledge structuring, anchored to a core ontology of dissertation writing practices, and encouraging the addition of evolving community-generated relevant content, both supports individual students writing dissertations and enhances traditional face to face supervision.

Executive Summary

The distinctive contribution of this project has been to demonstrate that next generation emergent technologies can enhance student experience and achievement in dissertation writing and make more effective use of staff time in dissertation support and supervision. The dissertation is a major component of many undergraduate and all taught post-graduate degree programmes. It carries a heavy credit weighting, is a key element of the student experience and exerts a substantial influence upon overall performance. Designed to be a synthesis of the degree programme; the actual experience is too often fraught and frustrating. And it is as challenging for staff as it is for students.

Our Vision

We wanted to develop technology that put learning and learners first and made a significant, practical difference to dissertation students and their supervisors. Free students from the confusion and anxiety that blights the dissertation writing process; make best use of the time available to supervisors.

What We Did

Our multidisciplinary team – computer scientists, educationalist, staff developers and academic writing experts - worked with academic staff and students to develop a shared, online environment with examples of genuine work, relevant to the discipline they are working in, with explanatory annotations to guide students right through the dissertation writing process: from finding out what exactly a dissertation is to choosing a topic and a methodology, developing literature to inform the study, writing clearly and keeping track of the complex tasks involved in completing a successful dissertation.

Students can touch as well as look … The ADE is a dynamic, online networking environment for students and tutors to share resources, generic advice, examples and specific feedback at each stage of a dissertation project. The more students – and staff – contribute, the more useful it becomes. It is based on two important ideas about learning: that you build out from the things you can do to the things you can’t yet, guided by clear, explicit examples; and that informal social processes support and encourage learning. So, the ADE incorporates social networking elements, similar to popular sites such as Facebook®, which help to create a community and dispel the isolation that distorts the achievement of too many dissertation students.

How We Did It

The ADE is built on a SemanticMediaWiki. Clever stuff, which enables you to tag and collect content on the basis of its properties not just its themes. So, for example, if you want to see the difference between a descriptive and analytical literature review, and good and bad examples of topic choices, you can. These distinctive features of the ADE are known as semantic social scaffolding. We tested the ADE with students taking courses as diverse as Fashion Design and Philosophy, with UGs and PGs, studying part-time and full-time and with varied routes into education. The feedback from them and their tutors was overwhelmingly positive.

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