The Academic Writing Toolkit is an online resource that was developed to provide students with accessible and timely guidance on key aspects of academic writing in Hibernia College's blended-learning ITE programmes. Available to students and faculty via the College's Moodle VLE and designed for asynchronous delivery, the Toolkit provides guidance on 'technical' writing skills such as referencing, grammar, formatting and style as well as on specialised areas as reflective writing, assessment writing and dissertation writing. The design was informed by a 'bite-size' ethos to encourage continuous, formative and self-motivated use over time. However, patterns of student engagement with the first iteration suggested that, following an initial peak of activity, there was little evidence of students returning to the Toolkit for help on key topics at crucial points in their programmes. This paper will discuss how the Toolkit's content and positioning evolved in response to, firstly, findings from the initial engagement study and, secondly, increased awareness of the Toolkit's potential among College faculty. Findings from an inferential analysis of learning analytics data collected from activity logs for pre- and post-update iterations will be discussed. The results of the analysis, combined with survey feedback on students' use experience, will inform an evaluation of the impact, if any, of specific design and dissemination enhancements on Toolkit engagement. It is hoped that these findings will provide insights into ways in which instructional design and faculty support considerations can help promote quality engagement with resources of this type, particularly for distance learners.

Presentation on an academic referencing support initiative undertaken at Hibernia College, Dublin by Irene O'Dowd (Researcher with the Digital Learning Department) and Ann Byrne (College librarian). The presentation was delivered at the IADTU conference, held in Bari, Italy in November 2021.

The Academic Writing Toolkit is an online resource developed for Hibernia College's blended-learning programmes in initial teacher education, to provide distance-learning students with accessible and timely guidance on improving their academic writing. Available to students and faculty via the Moodle LMS and designed for asynchronous delivery, the Toolkit provides guidance on technical writing skills such as referencing, grammar, formatting and style, as well as on specialised areas as reflective writing, assessment writing and dissertation writing. The design was informed by a chunked or bite-size ethos to encourage continuous, formative and self-motivated use throughout the academic programmes. However, an examination of user engagement patterns in the first year suggested that, contrary to expectations, there was little evidence of students returning to the Toolkit for help on key topics at crucial points in their programmes. This paper will outline how elements of the Toolkit were updated in response to findings from previous research (presented at OOFHEC2018). Findings from a study of engagement with the updated version of the Toolkit (n=334) will be presented, including comparisons of findings from learning analytics data collected from activity logs for pre- and post-redesign iterations. The results of this analysis, combined with survey feedback on students' use experience (n=41), will inform an evaluation of the impact of specific design and dissemination enhancements on Toolkit engagement. In particular, the impact of increased awareness of the Toolkit's potential among College faculty will be discussed. These findings will give practical insights into the roles of instructional design and faculty awareness in creating digital learning tools that meet the unique engagement and support needs of distance learners.

The Academic Writing Toolkit was developed by Hibernia College in 2017 in response to feedback from both faculty and students of the College’s Primary and Post-Primary ITE masters programmes. This feedback indicated a need for guidance and instruction on academic writing that was both student-teacher focused and distance-learner focused. Designed for asynchronous online delivery, the Toolkit covers standard academic-writing skills such as referencing, grammar, formatting and style. It also provides tailored guidance on reflective writing, assessment writing and dissertation writing from teacher education experts. Such writing practices form a crucial component of teacher formation by fostering skills in reflective practice and critical thinking (Day, 1999; Whitehead, 2000) as well as supporting the development of teacher self-identity as practitioner-researchers (Stenhouse, 1975; Argyris & Schön, 1976). This paper summarises the theory and principles guiding the Toolkit’s design and draws on a study of quantitative and qualitative data to obtain insight into students' usage patterns and their experience of the Toolkit. The study focused on Primary and Post-primary programme cohorts (n=315) and used data derived from a combination of user logs, online surveys (n=52) and student records. Ethical approval for this research was obtained from the College’s Research Ethics Committee. Among the findings from the study were strong preferences expressed by students for instructional modalities that enhance the sense of teaching presence in online content (Garrison et al., 2000) and a scheduling approach that recognises the patterns and workload of distance-learning students.