Traversing Obstacles in Developing Pre-Arrival Platforms

We all hear so much about success stories and are so keen to share our own successes; it can be easy to sweep the not-so-successful stories under the rug. In this chapter, Kelly Edmunds and Becky Lewis aim to share their reflections on their journey developing pre-university transitions platforms, particularly focusing on what did not work as well as they had hoped and what they learnt from these experiences. Kelly and Becky began by developing interactive student workshops that drew on expertise from an interdisciplinary team and aimed to build student confidence and competency in academic skills from early in their academic journey. The pandemic then saw these shift online and eventually evolve in to a Padlet-based ‘Transitions Toolkit’, with heavy input from student interns, which received minimal engagement from incoming students. They have several ideas to improve engagement with this, such as making the platform more linear, so there is a direction to the exploration of it, including synchronous sessions, to set a ‘sort of’ deadline for completing certain items. There will be more focus on student social activities to help build a stronger sense of community among the cohort along with more focus on receiving questions about university and less focus on providing information that we expect the students want to know.