Mix and match: student choice in accessing digital or face-to-face academic skills support

Abstract

Given the choice, will students opt for a face-to-face or online learning session? The 301 Academic Skills Centre at the University of Sheffield provides academic skills training (including study skills and maths and statistics support) to students in the form of workshops, 1:1 appointments and online resources. The transition to online learning during spring 2020 acted as a catalyst for us to develop our digital offer, which proved extremely popular with students studying remotely. As teaching has returned to the classroom we have been keen to retain some of the positive impacts of our online support and to continue to offer students a choice in how they access our extracurricular service. Throughout the 2021-22 academic year we have provided the option of attending 1:1 appointments and workshops either online or face-to-face, which has provided us with a dataset of student preferences. We have been surprised by the ongoing scale of demand for online training and support and student feedback on the service has provided us with an insight into the reasons behind this demand. This conference session presented data collected during the 2021-22 academic year to explore how and why some students may prefer an online learning alternative and how we intend to develop this delivery model in the future.