JourneyMap: Visualising the time-bound student journey

Abstract

A student's view of higher education is often talked about as 'transformative' and as a 'journey' or 'pathway'. The student experience of university is time-bound, covering a clearly specified duration. From a learner's perspective the Higher Education (HE) journey begins at induction and ends at graduation. Through discrete and highly personal steps students move from one state, fresher, to another, graduate. This personal journey is explicitly linear, rather than the cyclic, annualised, time-perspective of the university. The paper investigates how to visualise, in a temporal sense, this transformative journey. Incorporating necessary time bound events that appear in a students academic calendar and time table but in a student centric way that illustrates directly the journey the student takes and reinforces the time-bound, delineated nature of the student's HE experience. We document the results from development and present recommendations for future work. Time. Temporality. Interaction design. Experience. Research through design. Visualisation.

Playing the game: a realist approach to evaluating online student access, retention, progression and attainment initiatives

“…There is a paucity of longitudinal studies in this area, and only a limited number have evaluated the efficacy of online game-based initiatives (Buzzo and Phelps 2016;Hamshire, Whitton, and Whitton 2012;Krause and Williams 2015;Piatt 2009;Whitton et al 2014). Similar initiatives have combined game-based elements; however, the OHD is novel as it is entirely game-based (University of Kent 2019a).…”