WST21: Programme – Tuesday 9th March

Detailed Programme –  Tuesday 9th March:

Description Presenters
10.00-11.00: Koru Mindfulness – What is it and why should I care?

Participants will learn:

  • What is Koru Mindfulness? An evidence-based programme designed specifically for the emerging adult population at Duke University, to introduce students to a range of wellness skills through experiential learning. Koru uses in-class/on-line group practices, interaction with the teacher via the Koru dashboard and daily use of the Koru app. to allow individual participants to track their progress.
  • How the role of Koru within the Student Counselling Service has been significantly adapted to help more students stay connected with their peers, supporting each other as they face the challenges of the COVID pandemic.
  • How the creative use of Koru could enhance the mental health and wellbeing of students going forward, empowering them to stay connected and creating a community committed to  helping every individual to move through their educational pathway with a sense greater ease and a clearer sense of purpose.
 Jean Lynch Counselling Psychologist and Student Counsellor at UCD Student Counselling Service. Certified Koru Mindfulness Teacher. 

Dr. Triona Byrne Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Lead Manager, UCD Student Counselling Service.

Aoife Treacy Counselling Psychologist and Student Counsellor at UCD Student Counselling Service. Clinical assistant for Koru Mindfulness Groups
11.00-11.30: Not here, don’t fear – How UCD Student Services supports students across the Globe
UCD Student Services is responsible for a large part of the non-academic student support side of UCD. Through our services students make meaningful connections to each other, to Clubs and Societies and to UCD and we support their health and wellbeing both directly and indirectly. During the Covid Pandemic these supports had to be re-imagined. During this session you will discover how we engaged 1200 students around the globe and delivered over €23,000 to St Vincent de Paul and what we learnt while delivering Zoom fitness and wellbeing sessions to a database of over 2,500 participants amoungst a host of other exciting developments.A second device (eg phone) may be helpful for participants as the presenters intend to use polling software.		 Jason Masterson, Head of Service, UCD Student Services. Jason has worked at UCD Student Services for over a decade and now looks after a portfolio including the UCD Student Centre, UCD Orientation and Service delivery projects across UCD Student Services sub-units. Recently, Jason has led the Role out of Silvercloud our digital therapy service, UCD Student Centre’s Covid-19 Response and the re-design of UCD Orientation.
Mags D’Arcy, Communications Officer, UCD Student Services. Mags connects our key service offerings across a wide range of social, physical and wellbeing supports directly to students and the wider UCD Community. Most notably since the pandemic hit, she led IT development and delivery of the Reopening Campus Website and delivered the strategic marketing, advertising and registration plans for UCD100, Zoom online fitness classes and the UCD Student Health Covid Consultant Platform.
11.30-12.00: Motivating Students in a Virtual World: How Healthy UCD Adapted to Promoting Wellbeing Remotely

Healthy UCD was faced with a challenge when we found ourselves working and studying remotely – how could we continue to motivate students to look after their wellbeing in this challenging “new normal”.  In association with UCD Student Services, we devised and developed a challenge for UCD students called UCD100, where they signed up to complete 100km in 30 days while raising money for charity.  This session will cover the people and expertise needed to make UCD100 happen, how we successfully motivated over 1200 UCD students to sign up and how we endeavoured to keep them engaged for the duration of the challenge. We will also share our advice for others who may be planning to roll out a virtual initiative in UCD and reflect on areas where we feel there is still room for improvement. The presentation will include some interactive elements to get a sense of the challenges others in UCD have faced in carrying out their work remotely and give an opportunity for them to share how they have overcome these challenges.

 Maria Heffernan is a Research Assistant with Healthy UCD since April 2020. She graduated with a BSc in Human Nutrition from UCD in 2017 and subsequently undertook a research assistant position in the area of B vitamins and healthy aging, followed by a research MSc in the same area, graduating in 2020.
Brian Mullins  is Director of Sport and Health Promotion at UCD since May 2000. The Healthy UCD initiative was launched in 2016 when the Healthy UCD strategy – endorsed by UMT – commenced its work, led by Brian and supported by the Healthy UCD Steering Committee chaired by Professor Patricia Fitzpatrick.
12.00-12.30: Digital Transformation: To Infinity & Beyond.



Overview: The Student Recruitment Team will present our response to the changing landscape over the last year and the shift to a greater focus on digital platforms & engagement in order to deliver our recruitment campaigns. With some digital engagement projects already in place, learn how we leveraged the increased focus and need in this space over the past year to reframe our recruitment model, allowing focus on the opportunities to help underpin market development, a competitive edge and longevity in our workflow outputs. Hear how these new elements were implemented and how, through this new activity, we redefined our team engagement to enhance efficiency, learning and innovation. The learning and possibilities from this will help us underpin a hybrid model in the future.

 Student Recruitment Team Panel Session 

Susan McAlinden
Anne-Marie Harvey
Gary Reid
Rosemary Fagan
12.30-1.00:  Teaching primary source literacy online 


This presentation will examine how the availability of material on the UCD Digital Library enabled the transfer of an Arts and Humanities module that develops students’ primary source literacy skills to an online setting. The module, Primary Source Research, is a collaboration between the College of Arts and Humanities and the UCD Library Special Collections. It is offered to 160 students at Stage Two of the BA Humanities programme. The original iteration of the module in 2019/20 saw students experience hands-on interaction with materials in Special Collections including books, pamphlets, ephemera and literary manuscripts. This paper will detail how we adapted to module to an online environment and will explain how exposure to primary source materials in UCD Special Collection has led to the development of sophisticated research skills among this cohort of students.

 Evelyn Flanagan, Head of Special Collections, UCD Library.
1.00-2.00 Google Currents – Networking opportunities and view Posters    
3.00-4.00: Improving Engagement Outcomes in Remote Learning Environments: Building Insights and Interventions 


Our UCD LEAP project team is examining how to attain programme-level visibility of student engagement while interlinking real-time support once individual disengagement occurs. With two years of research complete, there are already many lessons learned worth sharing. However, the last 12 months have given us an additional challenge, namely: “How do we replicate visibility student engagement visibility while traditional face-to-face touchpoints are unavailable?” Participants can expect to hear about:

  • How we’ve approached the challenge of assessing engagement remotely.
  • The insights we’ve attained to date.
  • The tools and reporting we’ve created for sharing real-time insights with staff.

We hope that this session can:

  • Give participants ideas for how to assess student engagement in their area, whether at programme level or more locally.
  • Help with some of the technical setup / data / GDPR questions they may have.
  • Most importantly, we hope that attendees looking to implement similar initiatives will be able to use this info to avoid pitfalls we’ve come across to date!
 John Wyatt, Project Manager for UCD LEAP Project – primary focus on and experience in the areas of process improvement, analytics and improving services.
Dr. Maurice Kinsella, Researcher for UCD LEAP Project – primary focus on and experience in the areas of research, intervention design, and fostering student autonomy.
Niamh Nestor, Student Adviser