Placement Podcasts - The University of Huddersfield Experience

Theme: Innovative Projects

Title: Placement Podcasts
The University of Huddersfield Experience

Lisa Ward, TQEF Work Placement and Project Manager, Vice Chancellor’s Office,
University of Huddersfield, L.Ward@hud.ac.uk
Jane Gaffikin, TQEF Project Officer Vice Chancellor’s Office,
University of Huddersfield, J.gaffikin3@hud.ac.uk

Synopsis

Aims and Objectives

The University of Huddersfield is one of the top five providers of sandwich education in the UK. However, like many institutions in the UK, we are aware that as student expectations change, we need to do more to encourage our students to take up the wide variety of sandwich and other work placement opportunities available.

Anecdotal evidence has shown that the best ambassadors for placements are the students who have al-ready benefited from them. Therefore we have instigated an original project entitled ‘Placement Pod casts’ to film and / or audio record students talking about their placement experiences. This material will be used to encourage students to take up placement opportunities and to market the University as a centre of excellence for sandwich placements and other work placement opportunities.

Experiences Covered

The paper addresses the following themes:
• Industry experiences including service, healthcare and other sectors. The students that we are film-ing come from traditional areas of student placements, and newer areas including nursing, social work and careers guidance.
• Best practices: The traditional area of written case studies is well developed. This project looks at moving this forward.
• Enabling Technologies: How we intend to host the finished ‘pod casts’ and ‘videos’ on technolo-gies such as the web and DVD.

Issues to be addressed

We are currently in the early phases of this project. Initial filming has taken place of a group of stu-dents. The paper will discuss technical and practical issues associated with the project. My intention is to showcase a short film showing the work that we have done.

The author will then request audience participation in answering the question: ‘Why and how have stu-dent expectations changed vis-à-vis sandwich programmes, and how does technology like pod casts meet the new expectations?’