Academic Course Contact Role
This page contains information about your role and expectations as a PAL Academic Course Contact and the support by the PAL Central Team:
As an Academic Course Contact, you will play a large part in the recruitment of your PAL Leaders each year.
We ask that you assist us by:
- Promoting the PAL Leader role to your students using all communication channels available.
Please see actions you can take here: 'Promoting recruitment'.
- Decision making on which candidates are suitable for the PAL Leader role by shortlisting applications
Please find more details about this in the 'Recruitment' tab.
We expect PAL Leaders to communicate with you if they have any concerns or feedback related to your programme,
When PAL Leaders require academic support such as assistance with topics L4 students struggle with, resources to build a session, exercises related to a specific subject or any other course specific matter, we hope that you can assist Leaders to ensure the experience for your L4 cohort receiving PAL is a positive one.
Note: the Central PAL Team will enrol PAL Leaders onto L4 units so to have direct access to students' resources
Encouraging student attendance
As a PAL Academic Course Contact, we find it is important to support your PAL Leaders where you can - this includes helping to encourage Level 4 students to attend the sessions in order for the PAL Leaders to have a good turn out each week and a more successful session for everyone involved. Students will surely get out of PAL what they put in!
See 'the 'Promoting Sessions' page for more information.
PAL Session Cancellation
The process to cancel a PAL session is as the following:
- We ask the PAL Leader to email the Central PAL Team about the cancellation and cc you as the ACC in the email for your awareness
- To reschedule the PAL session, we address the Leader to contact their Faculty Timetablers who will assist with rearranging the session based on timetabling availability
Because PAL Leaders are required to record attendance in each PAL session in order to get paid, we please ask you to inform the Central PAL Team of any change or cancellation made by the Leader and communicated directly to you.
The PAL Scheme cannot work unless we're working together to ensure our PAL Leaders and students receiving PAL get the best experience possible. That's why we do as much as we can to support you with the processes!
The Central PAL Team contribute towards recruitment efforts by:
- Promotion of the PAL Leader role through many platforms (see 23-24 PAL Communication plan here)
- Gathering PAL Leaders applications centrally through an online form
- Store applications in Programmes' folders and share them with ACCs to be shortlisted
- Approach successful and unsuccessful candidates to communicate the outcome of their applications, to save you time
- Complete the employment process and delivery of a full 6 hours training "PAL Leader Facilitation Course" for successful applicants
- Managing personal challenges or wellbeing issues
- Managing the PAL Group and facilitating effectively
- Logistical issues related with rooms, timetabling, registers, pay related questions
PAL Leader Resignation
Every now and then, we get PAL Leaders who do not want to continue in their role - this can be for personal reasons or occasionally can be related to workload balance. As a Central PAL Team, we understand that your students' studies take priority. However we need to ensure that the absence of the PAL Leader is covered to ensure that their students are not missing out on the support PAL provides.
Since we require you to numerically rank candidates when shortlisting, we will automatically approach the next candidate on the list kept as a reserve and offer them to take on the role.
If there are no reserves available, 3 options will be considered depending on the time of the academic year:
A - The Central PAL Team/yourself liaise with timetabling to see if it is possible to merge two seminar groups together for PAL.
B - (Check with The Central PAL Team first) contact your Level 5 students to ask if anyone would be interested in becoming a PAL Leader and recruit a new student if there is interest.
C - Offer your existing PAL Leaders to take on additional sessions for the leaderless group.
Please CC PAL@bournemouth.ac.uk to all correspondence around covering a PAL session so we can support, assist and inform where possible.