In this post Maria Söderholm and her colleagues from the Student Services and Support department (Anna Pallin, Tomas Lilja, Thomas Wahlström, Richard Hartvik and Shireen Mallkoo) at Umeå University discuss how they have been working with rural students.

Our University is in the city of Umeå which is located in northern Sweden and has about 125 000 habitants. In the surrounding areas, there are many rural societies with long distances to urban areas. Umeå University has an important role for the further development of the northern region by providing research, education and public outreach.  

There are many people living in the northern rural areas who are eligible for higher education studies, but most of them do not continue their education after upper secondary school. Of those who do, many move to the urban areas by the coast, and may not return.

We developped a webinar project to connect with and inspire people from rural areas in the northern region to continue with higher education studies. By using webinars, we wanted to demonstrate to people that higher education studies can take place both on campus and at a distance. We wanted to encourage people from the northern rural areas to go further with their higher education studies.

It is important that all citizens have the same access to information about higher education and can get in touch with the university, regardless of whether they live close to or far from the cities. Therefore, our webinar project sought to make it easier for people outside the cities to connect with the university. Another aim of the project was to establish contact with career practitioners at adult learning centres in the northern rural areas, since they already relate to the local communities. These career practitioners are important for us in our aim to establish contact with prospective students and students outside Umeå.  

How we ran the webinars 

We delivered three webinars for students and prospective students in the northern rural areas. Two career practitioners were involved in the process of planning, developing and delivering the webinars.  

We started by making contact with career practitioners working in two of the adult learning centres in the northern regions’ rural areas. With them we discussed what might be appropriate activities for their students and prospective students in their area. We met in a first webinar and asked the career practitioners for input about the planning and development of future activities for their students. The first meeting resulted in a test webinar for students and prospective students from the two adult learning centres, where we delivered information about studies at the university (information about eligibility, graduating, labour market and contact details for us). The purpose of the test webinar was to learn more about what might be important issues for us in planning and delivering a webinar with a greater audience outside the university. More specifically, we wanted to learn about what could be technical issues and would be an appropriate content and time of the day for the webinar. 

The month after we contacted all adult learning centres in the northern rural areas and invited them, their students and prospective students for two webinars with information about higher education studies. Also, the career practitioners in the adult learning centres were invited for a test webinar the week before. The purpose of the test webinar was to make sure that our colleagues in the adult learning centres were familiar with the programme Zoom and prepared for technology issues that might appear during the webinar. This was important because some of the adult learning centres would send the webinar through video screen in classrooms and use microphones for the audiences’ questions.  

In the end of November, we delivered two webinars. The first webinar was about distance courses and programmes offered at Umeå University. The second was more like a drop-in session where students were able to ask questions.  

What happened? 

The dialog with the career practitioners at the adult learning centres was successful and valuable for us. Overall the contact we made with other career practitioners was an important outcome for this project. Now we have established contact with career practitioners from all over the northern region and it will make it easier for us to get in contact again for future occasions, like webinars or other activities.

But we also learnt a lot from the experience of running these webinars.

• Planning and communication with target groups is an important part of the process, especially in the beginning. 
  From this project we learned that there are many stages in the process of planning. Finding out who to contact, developing the aim of the activity and communicating it to the career practitioners at adult learning centres took a lot of time at the beginning of the project. Investing time in planning and making contacts will be valuable for us in future activities, therefore we would recommend others to put an effort to this stage of the process. 

• Invest in many contacts and marketing the event. 
  When planning the first webinar we were unsecure about the format and did not invite as many students as we could have done. It resulted in very few participants. For the other webinars we invited all adult learning centres and were more active in marketing the event. It resulted in more participants. Hopefully, when the concept of our webinars is more well-known, we will have even more participants in our webinars, and we will be able to meet with many more of our prospective students and students through webinars.  

• This project made us consider if we also should communicate through social media.  
  We marketed the webinars through a range of different channels including: an event at the Umeå University website that was shared through Facebook; the learning centre’s websites and emails. Communicating through social media (with our own account) would probably make it easier for us to directly reach out to prospective students and students. For example, a Facebook page might make it easier for us to communicate directly with our clients and share information no matter if they are at campus or not. Also, it could make it easier for us to market the event by ourselves (for example by making an invitation or sharing the event with our target groups).  

Overall the project was a big success and we are keen to deliver more webinars in a similar style. Now that we have established contact with the adult learning centres and they appreciated the events, there are expectations for future events.

We want the webinars to be a recurring event during the semesters. We would like to enlarge the project to include webinars with different content suited for different groups of prospective students and students. For example, we are thinking of developing a webinar for newly arrived citizens about eligibility and application for higher education studies. Also, in our mind is to develop webinars for current students about internationalization, exchange studies and career development strategies. Probably there are more ideas to come, what we will realize depends on the resources of time and staff in our department.