As the guided development space within the PebblePad learning technology platform, Flourish allows students to receive support from a tutor, mentor, supervisor, or other guide who has a role in directing achievement, development, and success.  The new development offers the unique opportunity to integrate user data, tasks, and conversations within an easily managed, secure online space.

Shane Sutherland, development director at Pebble, explains, "A lack of engagement with struggling students is a frequent cause of poor retention rates. Having tools to easily monitor academic and peer interaction, review achievement, and directly communicate with learners will help to identify issues quickly."

Students and guides can see key development information such as grades, feedback, meetings, tasks, and milestones, and these can be flagged, highlighted, or commented on by the student or supervisor. This facilitates ongoing dialogue around areas that evidence performance over time.

Helping Students to Flourish; Providing Targeted Support

Shane adds, "National Student Satisfaction surveys commonly record low satisfaction with assessment and feedback by learners. This has resulted from low-frequency learner-tutor interaction, inadequate or late feedback, and the difficulty for tutors to access meaningful student data. Feedback gives tutors the ability to rapidly review student progress, compare this across their cohort, to provide appropriate feedback where necessary, and create tasks to stimulate action by the learner.

"There is a real need for academic establishments to provide consistently high-quality support to all learners. Tracking feedback and academic engagement across whole programmes and departments is challenging. Flourish allows institutional data to be linked with curriculum-based activities and conversations at the learner level, with simple tools to aggregate teacher access to individuals, groups, cohorts, and programmes."

Flourish can also cater for the instances where users will have multiple guides, for example research students and their supervisory teams. 

Flourish Brings Benefits across Campus

• For learners, it offers a secure space in which all their personal feedback and academic achievements can be stored, discussed, and acted upon. No other learning-management system offers the integration of assessment data and feedback with forward-looking development activities.
• For teachers, it offers an aggregation of all your learner information and conversations using dynamic analytic charts. It also allows teachers to create designs for learning that require learners to complete a whole module, year, or programme of tasks within a hierarchy of milestone dates
• For tutors, it provides an intimate view of all tutee achievement, interactions, and conversations, allowing conversations to develop at academic or pastoral level and contextualised feedback to be provided
• For research students, all meetings, activities, and conversations with supervisors can be stored, giving greater consistency and structure to personal development and direction towards critical milestones, such as annual progression and doctoral award 
• For supervisors, all research students’ progress can be easily reviewed, with metrics to provide updates on task completion, meetings and conversations.