About Southampton Solent University
With an industry-leading approach to teaching a diverse student body and working with employees from many different backgrounds, Southampton Solent University is breaking new ground both in its research and its academic approach.
Southampton Solent University is the first to use new diversity video training from us, which takes into account millennials preferred learning style by being 90% video-led.
The challenge
Southampton Solent University has been using our eLearning courses for several years, but the HR team wanted their employees and students to get a level of training that reflected modern best practice.
As Lisa Gridley, HR Development Manager at Southampton Solent University explains:
“We went out to market as we needed a supplier who had a product that could be used on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. We’ve got quite a diverse audience, so we needed to meet their needs as well.”
As part of its training programme, Southampton Solent University is looking at how it can better educate about working with different nationalities represented across students and staff. Lisa and HR colleagues chose the key topics of unconscious bias and equality and diversity training as the starting points for their new eLearning programme. The goal was to raise awareness and educate about these key issues to help students and staff empathise with students from different backgrounds at the university.
The solution
Southampton Solent University engaged us to upgrade its eLearning programme to fit with modern best practice. Our suite of video eLearning addressed the needs perfectly. As Lisa explains:
“David came down to meet us to discuss our needs and we found that [Marshalls] could provide us with what we needed; we liked the courses and the way they flowed, in particular the videos that showed unconscious bias, and equality and diversity training.”
The videos bring the subject matter to life, especially where issues like unconscious bias and equality and diversity can be difficult to understand without real-life examples. Our video eLearning solution created an eLearning experience that did just that.
“The videos offered real-life examples,” Lisa said. “We worked with [Marshalls] on the scripts to make sure they were suitable for our needs.”
The course anticipates that people have been asked to do diversity training before and maybe complacent about the topic so looks at areas such as neurodiversity or diversity of thought.
All of the courses in our eLearning courses are built to be HTML5-compliant and mobile-responsive. This means the courses work across mobile and tablet devices, as well laptop and desktop devices.
The results
The videos have successfully created debate around the issues of unconscious bias and equality and diversity for both students and staff. The HR team at Southampton Solent University are even looking at how to improve the performance of BME learners at their institution, with our video eLearning being part of this effort. As Lisa outlines:
“We have a diverse workforce and lots of nationalities at the university, and these were well-reflected in the video. We’re also looking at how to improve the performance of BME learners at our institution, including looking at the issues of diversity and unconscious bias training to see how we might be able to improve this.”
We worked closely with their range of diversity and equality experts to create video content that’s lifelike, visually engaging and focuses on storytelling to bring the issues to life.
“People can relate to videos easier, as you can see people acting out situations. The scenarios reflect real-life situations and bring the subtleties to life of things like bullying. You can see the subtleties of body language or a misplaced word or nuances in language in tone; you don’t get that from reading something about equality and diversity.”
Start your project with us
With the increasing demand for student-focused courses, we’ve designed a suite of courses in partnership with universities, tailored to meet the mental, physical and emotional needs of today’s students.
Our range of eLearning courses for students includes courses on:
- Alcohol and drug awareness (developed with Brunel University London)
- Sexual consent on campus
- Diversity training for students (developed with the University of St Andrew’s and University of Manchester)
- Social media savvy (developed with Canterbury Christ Church University)
Contact us to find out more about the higher education suite of eLearning courses.
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