Preparation and support of students on a period of residence abroad, using an electronic mailing list

Ursula Stickler and Tim W. Lewis
(MLTC University of Sheffield, UK)

Biographical details:
Mag. Dr. Ursula Stickler, M.A.
Born in Austria. Currently working as German language tutor and Language Advisor at the MLTC, University of Sheffield
Postal address: MLTC, University of Sheffield, Floor 2, Arts Tower, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2NA, UK
Email address: U.F.Stickler@sheffield.ac.uk

Tim W. Lewis, BA, MA, PhD
Director of the MLTC, University of Sheffield
Postal address: MLTC, University of Sheffield, Floor 2, Arts Tower, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2NA, UK
Email address: T.W.Lewis@sheffield.ac.uk

Abstract:
This paper evaluates the use students make of a year abroad mailing list that offers the opportunity of on-line contact between students currently on placement in Europe and those preparing for their period of residence abroad. The list has two chief functions: to provide support to students currently abroad and to prepare second-year students for the period abroad, by putting them in contact with those already studying and working in Europe.
The mailing list established in the MLTC (Modern Languages Teaching Centre) of the University of Sheffield as part of the Interculture Project is presented in its technical details, looking at the advantages of open vs. closed lists, archives and access to participants’ details. It examines the role of the “list manager” in stimulating discussions and offering technical help and guidance and the use students make of the mailing list.
Introduction
In 1995-96, higher education in the United Kingdom underwent a process called TQA (Teaching Quality Assessment). this meant that teams of external assessors visited every university department in the country to ascertain if they were obtaining the goals they were setting for themselves. Departments were graded as excellent, satisfactory, approved, unsatisfactory or not approved. Reports were then published for each of the institutions thus visited and for the subjects as a whole. On the basis of these reports, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) established a programme of initiatives called FDTL, for funding the development of teaching and learning in the universities of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The aim was to remedy weaknesses and shortcomings in the provision of education. 
In the subject area Modern Languages, 10 such projects were established to run from 1997 to 2000, dealing with such aspects of the curriculum as autonomous learning, transferable skills, the use of IT, initial and in-service staff development, and maximising the effectiveness of the period of residence abroad. In fact no fewer than three of the 10 projects were devoted to the last of these, an indication of the seriousness with which it is held in the UK.
The present paper reports on one of these projects: The Interculture Project (ICP).
The Interculture Project, which is co-ordinated by the University of Lancaster, aims to raise awareness of intercultural adjustments that are necessary to enable students to make the most of their period of residence abroad.
One element of the ICP is provided by the University of Sheffield, whose role has been to develop the means of supporting students spending a year in other European countries. This has taken two broad forms: firstly, diaries and secondly, the mailing list.
The present paper deals with the second of these. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time this means has been used to support students on a period of residence abroad. Given the ubiquity of the internet it is unlikely that it will remain so. But in any case, our experiences and the knowledge they have given us are worth retailing to enable other institutions to develop effectively the use of mailing list to support periods of residence abroad.
The MLTC
The Modern Languages Teaching Centre of the University of Sheffield (MLTC) provides languages courses for non-specialists. Students of other departments (engineering, sciences, social sciences, arts) can choose languages as part of their degree or as optional modules in their main courses. Within the range of courses we teach, students can choose between four different languages (French, German, Spanish and Italian) and - at the higher stages - between different forms of courses, from highly structured taught language courses to fairly independent modules like Tandem learning.
A number of our students choose to spend a part of their degree course at a European university where they have to attend courses in their main subject and sit exams. For these students, the MLTC offers special preparatory courses (the Placement Preparation Module). During their stay abroad, some of these students have to complete language modules with us, either in the form of a project which is presented once they return, or in the form of a diary which is sent back to Sheffield.
The Purpose of the Mailing List 
In the academic year 1998-99, we first introduced a mailing list for students on their placement abroad to offer them the opportunity to keep in touch with their home university and other students in different places in Europe. Participants on the list are year abroad tutors in Sheffield, students from modern languages departments and students of the MLTC spending the academic year abroad, as well as those who were preparing to go abroad for this academic year.
The decision to set up a mailing list for students undertaking periods of residence abroad was taken in the light of interviews conducted with the first cohort of students on the Interculture project. Some students mentioned that they had had difficulty getting in contact with Sheffield, others expressed a feeling of being left alone while abroad. The disadvantage of losing contact with fellow students was another concern expressed in the interviews. Almost identical concerns were identified in a survey of student satisfaction with work placement experience in the UK carried out by the University of Bournemouth in 1995. The result was summarised as follows:
“In 1995 a survey of undergraduate student satisfaction with their third year placement experiences was undertaken. In this survey some students had indicated that while out on placement they felt isolated from their friends, they didn't feel part of the University and suggested that their courses could do more to improve communication with them.” (Fleming &  Hutchings 1998)
A summary of the survey can be found under : 
 http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/service-depts/as/lsu/pspr.html
This even though they were placed in the UK, rather than in continental Europe.
This shows that although departments are making great efforts to support students during their placements, some students may need more frequent or personal contact, whereas for some others a means of contact dissociated from their home departments and any ideas of “control” or assessment may be a welcome addition to more conventional and tutor-focused means of support, e.g. a visit from the department.
The balance between supporting students during their period of residence abroad and allowing them to develop a higher degree of independence and self-sufficiency is a delicate one in all circumstances. Nevertheless, we considered distinctly negative feelings, like loneliness, homesickness or perceived lack of interest by the home or host university might have detrimental effects on the students’ emotional well-being and consequently on their integration in the target language culture. We searched for a way to counteract this by offering as many students as possible the chance to participate in a voluntary email exchange and stay in contact with their home university.
In setting up the mailing list, we had two major aims in mind: Firstly, we wanted to provide some online support for students during their period of residence abroad. Because we were not certain how many and which students would enrol, we die not make any presumptions on the content of the discussion that could go on via the mailing list. It would offer the possibility for open discussions on differences and similarities in placements.
The Advantages of Email
Information technology provided us with an appropriate means for almost instantaneous and widespread contact. Unlike individual phone-calls, letters or visits, internet-based communication can offer a number of individuals access to the same information and participation in the same discussion regardless of physical distance. For a cohort dispersed over Europe (and in some cases also Latin America), this seemed the only feasible way to set up a communication network; although relying on information technology and the internet meant that students without access to computers would be excluded from this option. Nevertheless, in our view the advantages outweighed the limitations: the internet is relatively cheap, even free to university users, and offers more flexibility and greater opportunity  for contact compared to telephone or visits and it is structured as a network rather than as a series of one-to-one contacts.
Of all the internet-based group communication options (internet phone, video conferencing, discussion lists, etc.) we wanted to have a low-tech, easy access, low maintenance form. In contrast to other projects (e.g. the Placement Support Project in Bournemouth, see Fleming & Huchings 1998), we could not offer our students any material support (modems, email accounts) but had to rely on the technical equipment they would find in their host institutions. 
In practice, a number of students going to France or Spain get their email accounts from “hotmail” or similar providers rather than the individual host institution. A possible future measure which might strengthen the role of the mailing list would be to inform outgoing students of their options (and the likely cost) for getting personal internet connections and email accounts in their host countries.
We decided to set up a mailing list from Sheffield and make it accessible to all students and year abroad tutors who were interested. Mailing lists are basically a collection of email addresses which are entered on a central system. Through a common address, every addressee receives any message sent to the list at the same time and every member can send messages to the central address. Access to an email account is the only technological pre-condition for joining a mailing list.
Open, Closed or Moderated List
Mailing lists can be organised in different ways: An open list allows in theory at least - any person with an email account to enrol on it via a central email address. A closed list is centrally administered and allows a co-ordinator to add to it the individual email addresses of participants in the list; only people centrally registered can send and receive email messages to or from this list. Thirdly, a monitored list can be an open or a closed list, but in contrast to the above, every email received is checked and approved by a central list manager before being forwarded to the list and thereafter received by all list members. 
Opting for an open list would mean establishing a self-organised discussion group on which students can enrol themselves and from which they can withdraw at will. The main disadvantage of this type of list is that it is open to abuse from people not involved in the project and commercial organisations using the web to advertise their products. A discussion forum - on which contributors do not have to enrol but in which they can participate freely - can be set up locally, on the university’s servers (which would not fulfil the purposes of our project) or publicly on the World Wide Web. The latter gives students throughout Europe and in other continents access to the list but entails the potential disadvantages of nuisance mail and loss of privacy.
A closed list provides a “discussion forum” for a select group and thereby perhaps minimises concerns students might have about confidentiality. The disadvantages of this kind of list are that it needs organisational input from a co-ordinator and that students have initially to write to a different email address from that which they will subsequently use, to request inclusion in the list.
Even more labour-intensive for the co-ordinator is a monitored list. This can be open to everyone but to avoid nuisance mail or private messages being sent to the entire list, the co-ordinator must read, approve and then forward every single message.
We finally decided on a compromise solution: we felt that confidentiality and avoidance of unwanted or nuisance emails outweighed the benefits of easy access and self-organisation so membership would be centrally enrolled. This central enrolment of interested parties only would, hopefully, make detailed screening of every message unnecessary. 
We set up a closed mailing list with one list co-ordinator in Sheffield. For reasons of confidentiality we opted for an informal archive of messages in the hands of the co-ordinator rather than the web-based storage of all the received email messages. Messages directed to the mailing list are stored in a message tray and backed up on a word file and students were offered access to this if they wanted to re-capture the discussion that preceded their joining the list or simply to re-read old messages.
Setting up 
Once these basic organisational decisions had been taken, the publicising of the mailing list started in May 1998, towards the end of the academic year 1997/98. It was at this point that students who would be spending a period of residence abroad in Europe in the following academic session were informed of the establishment of the list and of the aims behind it. Together with other Year Abroad information, cohort 3 students from Sheffield received an information sheet (1 page of A4) detailing the two new initiatives that had been taken in respect of residence abroad: the Year Abroad Diary and the Year Abroad Mailing list. They were asked to send their email addresses to the co-ordinator of the mailing list in Sheffield (U.Stickler) if they wanted to take part in discussions and keep in contact with fellow students and their home university during their stay. In addition, year abroad tutors in the language departments and the MLTC were asked to provide email addresses of students who might be interested in joining the list as and when they received them. 
The mailing list was set up on 3rd September 1998 to allow for students arriving in their host countries early.  At first only the email addresses of 11 Sheffield University tutors were included and the first outgoing message informed them that the mailing list would be ready to receive students forthwith. The first student was added on 15th September 1998 but the first message to students was not sent out before 4th of October when 3 more students had joined.
Overall, 40 students on their year abroad were enrolled on the list. Of those, only 13 had sent their email addresses directly to the list co-ordinator, the other 27 contacted their home departments or the MLTC’s year abroad tutors and their addresses were forwarded to the co-ordinator by the latter. After further requests for membership of the year abroad list from tutors in November and April, the overall number of tutors on the list was 14; for most of the year 12 tutors were members. One tutor was added for the Spring semester when he replaced another year abroad tutor and one tutor left for study leave in May and was consequently removed from the list.
The role of the Mailing list in preparing outgoing students
One further benefit of the mailing list was to enable students who were intending to take up placements abroad during the following session to gain information about their intended locations directly from the current year’s cohort. Accordingly, from the beginning of the Spring semester, students on the MLTC’s Placement Preparation Modules and all year 2 students in other languages departments preparing for their year abroad were offered the opportunity to join the mailing list to participate in discussions and send their specific enquiries to their colleagues currently abroad. 
The way for students still in Sheffield to join the list was to send their email address to the list co-ordinator or ask their tutor to do so. They were invited by the list co-ordinator via an email sent out to all MLTC students on PPM courses and to language department tutors. The majority of students who joined at this point were students from the MLTC (30 out of 36). This is certainly no coincidence since the option and its benefits were advertised most widely in the MLTC courses and the list co-ordinator is at the same time tutor of the PPM module in German. 35 students asked directly for inclusion on the list, 1 student’s address was forwarded by her tutor.

Participants	Number	Self-enrolled	active (number)	active 
(in percent)	
Students abroad	40	13	21	52.5%	
Tutors in Sheffield	12	12	6	50%	
Second year students in Sheffield (added Spring 99)	36	35	18	50%	
Table 1: Participants

Rates of participation
Since participation in the list was entirely voluntary, we were unable to predict the number of list-members who would contribute to the exchanges. It could have been assumed that students who had self-enrolled, i.e. sent their email address to the list co-ordinator directly, might have been more motivated to participate actively in the list. However, the exact manner of their joining the list does not seem to have much influence on whether or not the students contributed. Of the 40 students undertaking a period of residence abroad, 21 sent at least one email message to the list. 8 of them had self-enrolled, 13 were forwarded by their tutors. It seems that regardless of the initial effort to ask for enrolment on the list, only 8 out of 13 students who had done so made the additional effort to contribute a message to the list (app. 60%). Of the 27 students whose addresses were sent by their tutors, 13 sent at least one message. 
The rough average of 50% for silent members holds true for the rest of the list-members, as well: Of the 14 tutors who were in the group at least for part of the duration of the mailing list (including the co-ordinator), 6 contributed at least one message, 8 kept silent throughout the year. The numbers are similar for year 2 students added in the Spring semester: 18 out of 36 students based in Sheffield and preparing for their own period of residence abroad sent at least one message (mostly enquiries) to the list, 18 did not communicate to the entire mailing list. (Whether or not they contacted individual members of the list is not possible to ascertain with our technical means, and would not be informative for this study, anyway.)
The mailing list was successful as it turned out not only to be a means of information distribution (one-to-many) but rather an interactive discussion forum (many-to-many) in the sense that Paulsen (1995) describes as one of the pedagogic uses of computer mediated communication:
“Forums
A forum can be explained as a technique where "participants question and discuss the presentation as a total group." (Knox 1987, 88). Alternatively, a forum can be defined as "an open discussion carried on by one or more resource persons and an entire group. It is used when large groups of twenty-five persons or more meet for the purpose of diffusion of knowledge, information, or opinion. The forum tends to be semiformal in nature and is directed by a moderator. The moderator is responsible for guiding discussion during which the audience is encouraged to raise and discuss issues, make comments, offer information, or ask questions of the resource person(s) and each other." (Sisco 1990, 285)” (Paulsen 1995, online)
Types of messages
Over the year, the mailing list received 82 email messages: 36 were sent by students from abroad; 22 messages were from second year students in Sheffield sent in the second half of the year. 17 messages were sent by the list co-ordinator (who also forwarded 3 messages which were sent to her private address) and the remaining 7 messages were sent by other tutors in Sheffield.

Insert Figure 1

In addition to these messages to or clearly intended for the mailing list, the co-ordinator received 7 specific enquiries to her personal email address from individual students. One of them, a student from the French department, was asking for an email address, the others were students from the MLTC asking about module choices for the next academic year. Obviously students recognised the mailing list co-ordinator as a source for information or contact with their home university.
Of the 17 messages sent by the list co-ordinator, the first was sent to tutors to remind them of the existence of the list. The next two messages were greetings messages for new members of the list. 8 messages about technical and organisational points - such as, how to send messages to the list or to individual participants, and a list of members - were sent out. The other 6 emails were sent to stimulate discussion and provide students abroad with some information about events in Sheffield.
Looking at the sequence of messages, a clear pattern emerges for the first half of the year: a majority of students’ contributions are responses to the list co-ordinator’s messages. The first message to students (04/10/98) received only one joint reply from two students in Toulouse owing to the limited number of list members at this stage (i.e. 11 tutors, 4 students). The next message sent out by the co-ordinator on 21/10/98 received 6 responses. Students started detailing their experience and describing their surroundings. Reacting to this, 2 more students sent comments to the list over the next 2 weeks.
The next email message from the co-ordinator (“Getting darker...” 28/11/98) received 7 answers in only three days. Students reacted to a question about what people do when it gets colder and darker outside, comparing temperatures in various places in Europe, detailing events and customs for the winter time and introducing themselves if they hadn’t done so before (“Dear All, I am a mechanical engineer called Dave and I though [sic] that it was about time that I said ‘Hi’ to everyone out there.”). Two students showed particular appreciation for receiving mail (“...it’s nice to think some one cares about us back home in sunny Sheffield.”).
Email messages containing only technical tips on how to use the mailing list, how to send messages, etc. did not normally receive any replies.
In the Spring semester, due to the changing membership of the list, the messages took on a new and slightly different quality. Instead of reports from various places and events in the host countries as responses to the list co-ordinator’s questions, students abroad and other tutors in Sheffield started responding to enquiries sent by second year students to the list. 
Although the first mail sent by a Sheffield student was rather general, asking about “studying abroad”, most of these enquiries were about specific places abroad. Queries about Rennes, Versailles, Regensburg, Malaga, Seville, Hamburg, Montpellier and Clermont-Ferrand all received answers. Students asking for details about Augsburg and Neuchâtel did not receive any answers via the mailing list. There are no students currently studying in Augsburg, but one student in Neuchâtel is on the list, and we are informed that she did correspond privately with the second year student preparing for her stay in Neuchâtel. The outgoing student records in her project a weekly email exchange with the student in Neuchâtel. Overall, students in Sheffield sent 14 specific queries to the mailing list; 10 received direct answers, at least one more received answers to her query personally.
Students at the MLTC who were doing a Placement Preparation Module at the time of preparing for their year abroad were using the mailing list as one of their sources of information. In projects and portfolio-work students handed in an overall number of 8 students (19% of all students on the PPM) quoted direct contact with Year Abroad students who are also on the mailing list. In some - but not all cases - it can be reconstructed that these contacts were established via the mailing list.
Comparison of functions
The mailing list has served two distinct purposes: in the first half of the year, the main benefit was for students abroad to be able to exchange views on their placements and share their experience with fellow students in similar situations in Europe and further afield. In the second half of the year, students in Sheffield preparing for their own period of residence abroad could get invaluable advice and information directly from other students who have already gained experience abroad. This proved especially valuable for non-specialist students who are sent to a variety of different placement and who do not always receive sufficient information from their non-linguistic home departments.
Although messages sent in the Spring semester tended to be more technical, practical and straightforward in general there were two notable exceptions: First: a very general enquiry about studying abroad in a German speaking country produced a detailed and enthusiastic response from a regular contributor, listing all the benefits of a year abroad experience and the specifics of his own host town and university (Graz, Austria). Second, two students enquiring about Seville and worried about their level of Spanish got detailed responses from a student currently there and a story of a friend of her who also had very little Spanish when she started. 
As mentioned above, some students abroad chose to use the list only as a starting point for one-to-one email exchanges, offering their colleagues in Sheffield to write to them privately in more detail. One of the few such message to reach the entire list begins with an explanation for this phenomenon:
“I don’t really know why I hit the ‘reply to all recipients’ key other than to show everyone else out in Europe at the moment that they are truly missing out by not being in Graz!”
This preference for a more private exchange does of course narrow the range of messages open for us to evaluate, on the other hand, it shows willingness to co-operate and help fellow students, hopefully leading to useful preparation on one side and reflection on the other which is one of the purposes for which the list was set up in the first place.
Overall, the mailing list can be seen as a success, although there are a few problems which should be avoided next year with more experience and know-how behind it.
Firstly, it was recommended by our technical support in the Corporate Information and Computing Services (CICS) not to use the “reply-to-all” option for the mailing list, as every member could choose whether to reply to the sender or to the list themselves and “reply-to-all” is an option that might cause technical problems. As a result, some messages came directly to the list co-ordinator or the tutor who had sent out the message although they were clearly intended for the entire list. These messages had to be forwarded. After Easter, the “reply-to-all” option was installed and messages came back to the list. Throughout the year only two stray messages (messages obviously intended for one individual but sent to the entire list) were received.
The main benefits of the list remain: 
•	It stimulates students spending a year abroad to report on and compare their experiences in different European countries; 
•	it helps them to keep in informal contact with their home university; and, last but not least, 
•	it offers students preparing for their year abroad the unique chance to solicit support and information from fellow students who have already experienced the troublesome initial period of their residence abroad.
Conclusions
An important factor in providing support for the period of residence abroad is the students’ continuing relationship with the home university. Although the home university has to rely mainly on students’ own maturity and motivation to achieve progress and make the most of their experience abroad independently, autonomous learning does not have to mean “learning in solitude”. We can provide various means for students to stay in contact with the home department. 
In the context of the Interculture Project, we have developed a diary, that can offer structure for students’ independent work during the period of residence abroad, give them a channel of communication to the home department, and become a means for the tutor to follow a student’s development and progress. Rather than feeling left alone on their placement, students will perceive a continuing interest and care from their tutors. 
The mailing list is a more interactive means of support. It can offer students the opportunity to learn from each other in exchanging reports on their experience and comparing highs and lows of their period of residence abroad. In terms of immediacy, it certainly has advantages over a prestructured diary written on paper. According to the reaction of students on the mailing list, this instrument seems to provide a useful means of contact with fellow students abroad and with the home university. 
The introduction of second year students in Sheffield to the list in the second half of the year seems to have been appropriately (though fortuitously) timed. It helped to stimulate exchange on the mailing list when the immediate needs of the students abroad to keep in contact with their home university has slackened off after Christmas.
Finally, all year abroad students on the mailing list have been invited to a de-briefing meeting at the beginning of their final year in Sheffield. We hope to ascertain in a more detailed evaluation from returning students whether or not the mailing list helped to diminish their sense of isolation and how they perceived their own helping role as expert advisers in the second half of the year.

References:

Fleming H. & Huchings M.: Report on the Placement Support Project (Bournemouth University). delivered at the “Current Issues in Distance Learning” conference, Loughborough University, Jan. 1998.  http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/service-depts/as/lsu/paper.html

Paulsen, M.F.: The online report on pedagogical techniques for computer-mediated communication. Norway, Oslo 1995.  http://www.hs.nki.no/~morten/cmcped.htm

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