Universities & Colleges are Back!
How will your students be thinking of themselves as learners?
… and it doesn’t matter how experienced faculty is, we are all entering uncharted waters as we introduce our students to the ‘COVID World of Learning’.
Parents will be relieved or reticent; lecturers may be apprehensive or excited, students will be talkative, noisy, full of pent-up emotion, some new to the rigours and freedoms of college and university life, others just keen to get on with their social and academic lives. Nonetheless, everything will have changed. Those who left in March will have had multiple experiences of the massive disruption caused by COVID-19 with all students affected, but in different ways. However, students behaved as learners before lockdown, we can expect them to be rather different learners on returning to an academic environment after so challenging an intermission.
As one Head of Department has put it, ‘we already know that some students have busied themselves with community service, others have adopted a holiday mood, become blasé and unaccepting of lockdown rules to put additional pressure on public services, whilst the more unfortunate have had a torrid time and can’t wait to escape the mayhem of their home environments. So, how should we approach students who are in so many different places mentally?
We have had a number of ZOOM meetings with our expert panel, and they suggest that … ‘we could do worse than to establish the present state of each individual student’s Learning Power. That would mean adopting ELLI (the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory) as the most effective way of determining which learning habits have taken the most battering and, importantly, how responsive our students are as learners as they return to college’.
Explore ELLI
ELLI has been research-validated, both academically and operationally, among more than 100,000 people globally from all walks of life but most particularly among schoolchildren grappling to understand how they learn and thereby, improve their performance. The research teams, working in Bristol in the UK and at Penn State University in the USA, found, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there are just 7 basic building blocks, or dimensions, that hold the key to our capacity for learning.
Why is ELLI Unique?
- It plots the learner’s strength and weaknesses.
- It doesn’t ‘trait cast’ by tracking change.
- It monitors the ‘learning journey.’
- It upstages most psychometric tests.
- It creates a ‘growth mindset.’
THE 7 DIMENSIONS THAT DETERMINE LEARNING POWER
ELLI has 2 more vital attributes … it tracks changes in the student profile as the student’s responsiveness to learning changes AND is highly sensitive to the immediate learning environment, whether that be in the home, lecture theatre or coffee bar.
ELLI is extremely easy to use and helps to restore learning disciplines …
ELLI is extremely easy to use and helps to restore learning disciplines…
Input:
Participants answer an on-line questionnaire and become excited to be doing something with an immediate result. They don’t have to think too much and are given only 4 possible, repeated answers, to every question ∙ very like me ∙ quite like me ∙ a little like me ∙ not like me.
Output:
An immediate, but simple, spidergraphic with a user-friendly single page explanation. Participants can have fun comparing notes with one another, which also furthers their understanding of how they learn.
Further Explanation
Interpretation and suggested Interventions: Available in more detail with Learning to Learn with ELLI. Download £9.95
ELLI is the instrument that plots where the students are now as learners and saves the observation and guesswork otherwise needed to make a judgement! What is more, it enables the tracking of progress both with a student’s understanding of how they learn and the success of alternative delivery methodologies in lecture theatre or tutorial.
A Case in Point ….
| ENTRY PROFILE OF A FIRST-YEAR STUDENT This student had only been at College for a few weeks when the Natural History Department decided to adopt ELLI as a means of providing greater learning support to a group of students who had only been marginally qualified on entry. The majority were both confident socially and determined, but found learning in a self-directed environment challenging. In this case, resilience and the need to change learning habits were accepted, but this student needed help to become much more resourceful with the confidence to find the learning behaviours that best suited her. | |
| THE SAME STUDENT PROFILED IN HER SECOND AND THIRD YEARS … Very soon after the original first-year profile was taken, discussion with faculty revealed that Natural History did not really suit the student’s character as a learner. She would be much better suited to a programme in which the learning process was more closely directed. As a result, she was transferred to the Archaeology Department and a degree that she had not previously even considered. The blue profile was taken mid-way through the student’s second year in Archaeology following participation in a dig in Israel. The pink profile was taken as the student approached her final year exams. It had become clear that the student’s lack of resourcefulness and confidence as a learner were as much to do with her lack of understanding of herself as a learner as with the understanding and advice offered by her teachers in school. |
Following this student’s graduation she has remained in academia but as a ‘Student Experience Officer’ determined to assist students in finding themselves as learners. She is also considering how she might contribute to the improvement of advice given in school. |
Among ELLI’s institutional and Student Participants have been:
ELLI assesses and tracks Learning Power, recognising that ‘lifelong learning’ is a pre-requisite as students face 50 years of remaining marketable in an uncertain and rapidly changing world.
REGISTER NOW … and claim your introductory offer
ELLI Pricing
Notes:
- FREE ELLI TRIAL for 10 nominated students at registration
- Just £5 per registered student buys 2 profiles for every student registered, a ‘starter’ profile AND a ‘follow-up’ profile at a time of the student’s or lecturer’s discretion
- All profiles are anonymised and only visible to the student participating and the university/college’s internal administrator.
Thank you for your interest and for getting in touch with us