This intervention aimed to enhance female international students’ learning experience and improve their writing performance by using a powerful technology-enhanced learning approach (Digital stories - DS) and an inclusive collaborative group assessment strategy (ICGA). ICGA was used to promote peer learning/mentoring and help female students better understand the assessment criteria and develop valuable professional skills i.e., negotiation. The researcher argues that a constructionist perspective (Papert & Harel, 1991) involving the use of expressive media for DS (a Digital Serious Game-based approach) and ICGA offer an appropriate frame for designing learning activities fostering individual creativity and collaborative learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Piaget, 1929) which also involve some form of peer mentoring (fostering inclusivity - Meletiadou, 2022) in learning how to write. DS were employed to:
• increase female students’ interaction and foster Social Justice to improve gender balance in Digital Business Management (DBM),
• engage them as partners in learning by allowing them to take responsibility for their own learning to retain female students and assure they finish their studies and start successful careers in the field,
• decolonise the curriculum by celebrating their multilingual identities through translanguaging to support and inspire young women in their careers and help them to overcome the main hurdles that prevent women to reach senior positions, and
• develop their digital skills by experimenting with multimodal literacies to have more international female students choosing DBM as their higher education studies and profession.
In terms of this initiative, 20 international female students studying DBM at LMU had to prepare a DS in the form of a website or a blog in which they could use text, videos, podcasts etc. to present their views on a topic and support them with arguments. They were then involved in ICGA, received feedback from their lecturer, wrote a paragraph reflecting on their achievements, challenges and areas for improvement and submitted their DS. DS were used to assess students’ performance and engage them in ICGA and self-reflection to help them better understand the assessment criteria, the task requirements and the topics taught in terms of the module.
Students were able to to increase their performance by 30% (I compared students’ pre-tests vs post-tests in the experimental module) in one semester. Female international students’ satisfaction in the student module survey was 91% (compared to 75% last year) which clearly indicated that students enjoyed the experience. Students were also eager to share their stories in terms of an online mini-conference I organised to provide a taster of first year modules to foundation year students aiming to support students’ transition from L3 to L4 and support recruitment and progression to the next level.
The present initiative aims to assist lecturers use technologically suffused pedagogy to meet module aims successfully and increase female representation in the field of DBM enabling more international female students who face linguistic and cultural barriers enter and remain in this field.