Implementing a study support service (Studiosity) software system to improve students' academic writing skills

Abstract

In an effort to respond to the UK's OfS (Office for Students) Gravity Assist review the Digital Learning team at the University of Bedfordshire have been experimenting with ways to improve the experiences of students' academic writing skills as part of an effective digital induction, to support students' transitions into HE (Higher Education), and for our existing student body. A key part of our efforts has focussed upon using a study support service called Studiosity which provides students with feedback on their assessments and academic work. Rather than focusing upon a service which utilises AI for feedback, we opted to utilise a service which provides feedback from a writing assessor. In this way the service mirrors, supports and provides a route for us to better understand our students' writing skills and to determine how we can feed forward and back to students and a multitude of organisational layers within the University which stretch across staff and student groups. Using a DBR (Design Based Research) approach we explore our initial considerations before approaching staff and students with the service, the technical and pedagogical considerations we made before our first engagements, and detail some of our experiences of engaging staff and students in the process of improving their academic writing. We move from these initial considerations to explain how we are engaging with academic and support colleagues within the University, the insights the data provides us about our students writing skills. We conclude the paper by providing an initial version of a potential implementation framework which other colleagues implementing similar schemes can build upon our initial mode to critique and develop their own implementations from. We also examine the possibilities for demonstrating the ways in which we can evidence and explain the ways we and our students think the service is effective. As this is our first iteration of the implementation, this paper also serves the secondary purpose of bracketing and recording our assumptions about our implementation. Our intention is to use this paper to document our initial iteration and we will return to provide an updated version of this paper as a point of reference for our next iteration.