The HardiBlog

We are delighted to announce that a three-year project on Retention and Writing at NUIG led by Dr Irina Ruppo at the Academic Writing Centre has been given funding  under the Student Project Fund scheme. Retention and Writing at NUIG adopts a two-pronged approach wherein research into writing and retention is combined with support for students over the summer months. This model was adopted for three weeks in the summer of 2018, and for six weeks in the summer of 2019, thanks to the support of the Student Services and from the Dean of Students respectively.  So far we have developed an approach to examine the connection between writing problems and retention issues, administered a survey to NUIG students, and analysed the data, while also providing summer writing support to postgraduate students and students preparing for repeat exams. At this point, we have the data to suggest a possible connection between writing problems and related to retention issues. The current p...

NUI Galway is to provide Ireland's first OER service and publishing platform for students and staff. The OER platform will create and promote open, free, and reusable OER learning materials. Led by the Library, with the Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching (CELT) and the Students' Union (SU). This project directly addresses one of the flagship goals of NUI Galway's strategy of Open NUI Galway to “ promote the use and production of Open Educational Resources ” . Create and publish your own OERs (due to launch in mid-2021) A pilot project to create NUI Galway OERs has been funded. OERs reduce costs and barriers for students while making learning easier and more accessible. Studies have found a direct link between OERs and higher test scores, lower failure rates, and lower drop-out rates. OERs also make course material more effective while promoting professional contributions of students and the academic community to teaching and learning in their field. ...

The Academic Writing Centre is coming back this summer. We will be doing all our work remotely, and we hope this will enable as many students as possible to access our services. We will open on 15 July and will remain open until 26 August. Whether you are working on repeat assignments, theses, or other projects, you are all welcome to avail of the following services: 1. Consultations over the email:.  Please send a quick email to awctutors@gmail.com . We will get back with a list of questions about your project. Answer as many of them as you can. Expect a detailed reply within 48 hours. This method allows us to target our advice to your writing needs without doing the work for you. 2. Phone/zoom consultations.  At the moment we can only offer one phone consultation every 2 days.  They are only available to students registered with the DSS. To avail of those, please email awctutors@gmail.com . Include the paper you would like to work on (for up to 40 minute...

Covid-19 has brought both challenges and opportunities to the delivery of reading list material.   We are delighted that the number of module leaders making use of the Reading List service has greatly increased and we already have reading lists for over 700 modules for the 2020/21 academic year.   We greatly appreciate all the academic staff who have engaged with the service, you are helping us to ensure your students will have stress-free and seamless access to their readings.   If you have yet to provide us with your Reading Lists for 20/21, you can find out how to do so on our Reading List Service page. The challenge facing us now are those books that are not available for sale as e-books with institution-wide access, or that are only available at exorbitant costs.   We would like to share some knowledge of this challenge, so that you, our academic colleagues, can understand why it may be necessary to consider recommending different books to your students...