Nurturing student success: adapting our world-class training for online delivery
When Covid-19 struck this time last year, we all had to make changes in various aspects of our lives. At Reed Business School, we knew we also had to adapt […]
When Covid-19 struck this time last year, we all had to make changes in various aspects of our lives. At Reed Business School, we knew we also had to adapt our world-class, classroom-based financial training in order to keep supporting our students with the best possible teaching to get them through their exams.
While we still very much believe in the value of face-to-face teaching and the importance of our school facility in the heart of the Cotswolds, we’d love to take a moment to tell you about the ways in which we’ve taken the best bits of our usual approach and made them work online in these unprecedented times.
Investing in the right technology
After thorough research, we decided to implement the Microsoft Teams training platform with an educational license to facilitate training, alongside ProSuite for easier administration and interaction with us. Integrating our existing programmes with Microsoft Teams has benefited the student experience in many ways:
- Student communication
All student/tutor communication can be held over chat streams and calls on Teams. The Teams app enables instant messaging and allows our staff to respond to queries quickly.
- Collaboration
Teams can be used to instigate extra lunchtime learning sessions, messages to individual students or groups in the same class, and to distribute extra learning/articles easily on the Posts function.
- Teaching improvements
Each lesson’s resources (including recordings of each class) can be saved to the same Team automatically at the end of class, allowing students to easily navigate between relevant texts, workbooks, and assignments. Our tutors can also instantly access everything they need to know about the students in their class and the work they’ve completed so far.
- Regular assignment monitoring
We’ve implemented day to day assignments for certain modules to allow greater insight on student progress, so we can follow-up with appropriate actions. This also enables us to predict exam results at an earlier stage, so we can take the right course of action with each student.
- Mock exams
We’ve always been advocates of mock exams, and we can now successfully manage these through the assignments function on Teams. Once the student completes their online assignment, it is then viewable by the tutor who can then mark this onscreen and provide feedback quickly.
- Immediate online student feedback
Using automated feedback forms allows students to submit feedback easily throughout the course, which our administrators can obtain and action swiftly.
We believe our technological solutions not only fall into line with how the qualifications – and indeed the industry as a whole – are moving towards digitalisation, but it also means that our tutors and students can continue to use the same method of teaching when working from home with all assignments automated to minimise changes to how these are delivered and accessed.
Sticking to our service principles
Although various things have changed – and many for the better – we continue to stick to our core service principles that we believe give our students the best possible experience:
Service is student/client-centred – Students / clients are the focus of our service always, and we go the extra mile to understand their individual needs and nurture their success.
Service is reliable and efficient – We provide the right, high quality service first time, every time. We keep our promises and are prompt and punctual with all our communication. Service is conducted with honesty and integrity.
Service is team-based – Our service excellence is a team responsibility. We work together to each person’s strengths, share resources, and support each other to provide the best service.
Systems that work
While many of our students have commented that they miss their trips to our school, we’re pleased to see the majority thriving online, having adapted well to our new setup. Indeed, Zoe Clark recently achieved a Bronze Award from ACCA for her consistently high performance across her strategic level exams in 2020, Lily Gammon achieved first place in her ACA Tax Compliance exam, and William Fowler placed in the top 10 in ICAEW’s annual order of merit in 2020.
We’re thrilled to see so many of our students reaping the benefits of our new way of learning, but we can’t wait to welcome as many as possible back to the Cotswolds as soon as it’s safe.
If you have any questions about our current online learning, please speak to a member of the team, who will be more than happy to assist.
