Peer-Led Academic Support for Pre-Arrival Students of the BVM&S Degree Program

Abstract

Mental health challenges are of growing concern to the veterinary community. Within veterinary education, there has been increasing focus on building resilience in students, and identifying likely stressors, such as the transition into the veterinary curriculum for first year students. In this study, we evaluated a peer-led project to provide pre-arrival materials for incoming students. Through a combination of learner analytics and post-course surveys, we investigated usage of resources and the effects on student's attitudes to the veterinary curriculum. Over the two years the course has been running, 159 students (64% of total) visited the course, but only 39% (n = 98) actively engaged with the materials. The course was most frequently accessed from Friday to Sunday (53% of visits), and over 50% of the visits occurred one week prior to arrival. The post-course questionnaire in the first year of the course's delivery had a 17% response rate (n = 24) and most students (71%) reflected on feeling anxious about beginning their studies. 88% said they felt they had benefited from the material's availability. While not all students used the resources, providing peer-led teaching opportunities at high-stress points is an effective method of easing transitions.

10 simple rules for supporting a temporary online pivot in higher education

“…You must also consider what you know of your cohort. There is evidence tosuggest that veterinary students, when given pre-arrival materials online, remain anxious about workload and engage with materials mainly outside of normal working hours(33).…”

Bridging the gap: implementation of an online induction course to support students’ transition into first year medicine

“…In the study focus group and survey results, students highlighted a desire for the induction course to include current student perspectives and guidance in future versions of the course. Indeed, peer-led support has been effective during induction in other professional degree programmes (Paterson et al, 2019). Other suggested materials that could easily be included in future versions of the course included an equipment list and an introduction to key terminology.…”

Educational Research

“…Learning analytics are a topic of increasing interest in the education research literature, in terms of how they can support educational outcomes and how they might also support institutions to develop their own strategies (Tsai et al, 2018). Learning analytics are commonly gathered from the Learning Management System and can include a variety of measures, such as the number of times a resource has been viewed, the times resources have been accessed, the number of discussions or flags raised on a piece of content, the duration of time a piece of content has been viewed (particularly in video resources) and the types of resources accessed (Dietz-Uhler & Hurn, 2013;Paterson et al, 2019). There can also be synthesized measures from analytics, such as active class sizes (MacKay et al, 2016) and identifying resources with unusual access patterns, e.g., those videos that were watched more than one standard deviation beyond the average video .…”