King’s Academic Skills for Learning was launched in September 2019 to provide students at King’s with resources to help them develop their academic skills. Students (and staff) can self-enrol via the KEATS (Moodle) dashboard.
King’s welcomes students from a range of backgrounds and with varying academic experiences, all with different requirements to further develop their academic skills. Student feedback indicated that they often struggle to locate appropriate resources and support. To address this, King’s Academy – working with input from colleagues from across King’s – led a project to provide a single point of entry to the resources available. This would replace the existing intranet-based offering with a KEATS-based alternative, given that many students at King’s regularly use this learning environment.
Online resources have been divided into nine themes, each containing a range of multimedia resources, many developed specifically for King’s Academic Skills for Learning. Third-party learning materials from Skills for Study and LinkedIn Learning have been incorporated to enhance the provision. The thematic approach enables to students to easily access existing online King’s resources, such as the popular KLaSS learning materials developed by Libraries and Collections.
Undergraduates and Masters (taught postgraduate) students can also book one-to-one sessions with our PhD Study Skills Leaders and select from our many workshops without leaving the site.
With over 5.5k students already enrolled, one-to-one support sessions consistently fully booked and workshops proving popular, we are very pleased with the initial take-up of the offering. However, this is only a fraction of the students who could be benefiting from the resource. Our time and resource constraints also meant that we had limited opportunity to get feedback from students to inform the initial development and content.
We would like to increase the number of students accessing academic skills development resources and support. Please promote to your faculty and students.
We are working on the next phase of development for King’s Academic Skills for Learning and we want it to reflect the needs of King’s students.
- Which resources are helpful for your students?
- Can you see any gaps?
- What would you like to see changed or developed for the next phase?
Please let us know via kings-academy@kcl.ac.uk or using the feedback options on KEATS.
Useful links:
Written by Rosemary Purr
As an Academic Skills Advisor, within King’s Academy I work with my colleagues to develop students’ academic skills across King’s. As part of my role I am leading on the development of King’s Academic Skills for Learning within KEATS.
