Poster: An exploration into Gen Z students’ experiences, attitudes and agency in choice of digital tools when collaborating on group work.

This project is both student-facing and staff-facing, so will involve consideration of many protected characteristics.

For staff-facing EDI, we will consider the nine, legally protected characteristics of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. When recruiting the AL to join the research team, we will ensure a clear Expression of Interest is circulated to offer fair recruitment.

How can we support collaboration and communication in online spaces? This project explores student experiences of ‘VoiceThread’, an interactive collaboration tool that enables users to build online presentations by adding images, documents, and videos, and other media to which other users can add comments for discussion and this activity will be given as a choice to other activities. Building on work already done through Praxis, such as the previous work on Discord, this project considers if student choice helps or hinders positive engagement and outcomes for distance learners. Implications for improved communication are explored from a student perspective.