In2Uni is an innovative community engagement project that seeks to raise the profile of tertiary education within selected local high schools in the Illawarra South East Region. It partners later year Journalism students from Faculty of Creative Arts with student cohorts from Years 7 – 12. Our students mentor the high school students and do a special project with them as part of this. There were visits to each of the schools back in March, and since then each cohort are beavering away on their projects – which vary depending on the age of the students. The blogs are private to each group, so we can’t show you inside, but here’s a snapshot of their usage. Thanks to Tara Loty (Co-ordinator) for agreeing to share these statistics on the number of new posts and comments per blog over the last few months.

Since the beginning of the year, the uptake of UOW blogs has increased and now we have: 101 teaching blogs (including 91 student/class blogs), 6 blogs for research groups or projects, and 7 blogs to communicate and engage with local communities. In the latter category is the In2Uni project, which has UOW students mentoring c300 local high-school students from years 7 – 12 and using a blog (one for each of the different school years) to keep the conversation going when the UOW mentors are not visiting the schools.