Anglia Ruskin University Case Study

Setting the scene

Anglia Ruskin University is the largest provider of Nursing education in the East of England with over 2000 pre-registration students enrolled onto their nursing programmes and 5000 supporting staff. In 2015, they replaced their paper-based portfolio with Myprogress, as part of a complete digital transformation, innovating their approach to assessing nursing students on placement and dramatically enhancing the student and staff experience.

What were the challenges?

With nursing students dispersed across three campuses and 200 placement areas, assessing students using a paper-based portfolio posed many challenges for the University. With a lack of visibility on student progression, it was difficult to track students on placement, meaning students were lacking support they needed and made early intervention for potentially failing students near enough impossible. With practice assessors only able to visit each hospital placement area once a week, students were also feeling isolated whilst on practice and unable to receive the feedback they needed to act on and progress.

How has Myprogress transformed assessment and feedback?

Following a successful pilot with Myprogress in 2015, Anglia Ruskin has since transformed their practice-based assessment process for all 2000 student nurses and 5000 mentors and as of Christmas 2018 became completely digital.  In this time, Anglia Ruskin has seen a dramatic increase in communication and engagement between students and staff, with students feeling better supported and practice assessors, supervisors and academic assessors having complete visibility of students progress whilst on placement. Additionally, through improving the student experience and gaining valuable insight into student progress and potential for failure, Anglia Ruskin has dramatically been able to reduce student attrition. Over the last 5 years, the attrition rate has reduced from over 20% in Cambridge to 2.5% and the transformation of assessment in practice with Myprogress was a contributing factor to this positive change.

Key Benefits

• Feedback to students was more comprehensive, especially with the speech to text functionality enabling mentors to provide feedback faster.
• Formative assessments were more likely to be completed on time with practice assessors able to view student progress and better support students.
• Mentorship experience was improved as students were able to prepare for meetings with practice assessors thanks to visibility of assessments.
• Students with learning needs such as Dyslexia were better supported - they were able to use native mobile features such as speech-to-text and spell-check, as well as built in features to organise their assessments.
• There has been an increase in both student and mentor digital literacy skills - improving digital literacy across NHS Trusts in the region.
• As students have access to learning resources on their device, students are more able to link theory to practice on placement.
• Improved efficiency as academics are able to provide additional support and engage with assessors in practice without taking time to travel to placements; this is key in meeting the new NMC standards.

Overall, through adopting digital practices, improving digital literacy and delivering this innovative project for practice-based assessment, the university has not only addressed its key challenges but has greatly enhanced the complete student and staff experience.

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