About the Project

Rationale

Student retention is a serious issue in the United Kingdom. Recent reports in the Times Educational supplement shows that government has spent over eight hundred million pounds in retaining higher education students. Further national learning and Skills councils comprehensive reporting of over 8,500 vocational students show that further education colleges consider retention to be a fundamental issue for the future. The current education and skills bill is expected to raise the learning age of all young people to eighteen requiring them to be in some form of education and further education colleges to be pro-active in retaining students in education. With financial penalties for dropping out of education it is imperative that further education colleges develop sound and effective retention strategies for all students.

C-xtra UK is a ‘national career award’ winning online retention toolkit (Institute of Careers Guidance: National Career awards/research 2007) offering teachers and students questions, advice and guidance on a range of key retention issues. The toolkit is a commercially viable website and this bid is supported by a commercial strategy to create ‘C-xtra EU’ with distributor partners in partner countries with an intercultural dialogue which will make the website specific to cultural and pedagogical needs. Involving partners in Sweden, Portugal and Austria offers a broad cultural sweep of retention issues and differing rates of retention and best practice per country.

C-xtra UK offers technological innovation in its use in the United Kingdom; with its class averaging of question answers for teachers to aid curriculum planning, and its diverse reports for students and teachers to help tailor one to one interactions around the key individual issues. Please visit www.c-xtra.co.uk for further information on the original UK system.

The Project

The C-XtraEU project will transfer and adapt the C-xtra concept to Austria, Portugal and Sweden.  This will involve translating, adapting and testing the content and then producing a new web interface in the appropriate languages.