Prior to the pandemic WIT’s School of Education and Lifelong Learning put a focus on developing online engagement for students on the institute’s online courses
The online engagement experience the online Springboard+ HDip Computer Science at Waterford Institute of Technology’s (WIT) has been published in the EUROPEAN SOCIAL FUND Programme for Employability, Inclusion and Learning 2014-2020 Newsletter 2020.
New role
Laura McGibney, Online Engagement Advisor with the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at SETU outlines how she started this new role for the fully online two-year part-time programme in January 2020 looking at ways to engage people who studied online.
“Then in February, along came a pandemic that engaged the whole world! How was I going to compete with that?”
Across two pages (pages 51-52 in the newsletter below) McGibney tells how already online students were supported once restrictions came into plan and the life changed for everybody.
Final edition
The piece was published in the 12th issue of the European Social Fund’s Newsletter and the final edition under the Programme for Employability, Inclusion and Learning 2014-2020. With funding of over €612m from the European Union, the PEIL 2014-2020 has helped over 400k people in Ireland since its inception in 2014.