ULC Consulting

We’re near the end of our project now and we just need to finish our final report! It will include all the research we did, including survey, focus-groups with students who dropped-out of Basic Dutch and interviews with tutors and experts. A lot to write about, right?

But we created an outline for our final report and divided it into parts, so every member of the team can add something to it. Also, it’s faster to write it this way! After that we will finish the report with our recommendation to the Language Centre of Maastricht University with advice how and why to implement them.

It’s a good tradition for our team to have team-building exercises during our meetings, especially like team dynamics meeting. We had it few days ago and it was a lot of fun but it also let us to reflect on our roles in the project, our team rules and dynamics.

The images are from one of these team exercises. Each of us had to choose 1 or 2 images which we associate with ourselves, our team members and our project. So here are the few that we chose!

Credits:

(1) Kristopher Roller, Unsplash

(2) Matthew Henry, Unsplash

For our project to move forward, we are having meetings with our client every week now, so we can reflect on the current progress and new goals! Last week we discussed the data collection from our survey, feedback from other teams and next steps.

Over the last week, we collected 70+ responses for our survey and our next step is to analyse the data. And to discuss it with our client! Regular meetings help us to keep the pace while in quarantine.

April update!

We reached one of our milestones and sent out a survey for the students of Basic Dutch. We created 30 questions that will help us to learn about students’ motivations, expectations and feedback of Basic Dutch course.

This was a productive Monday morning for our team! We are at the final stage of creating our survey, so we were reflecting on our notes and choosing the right questions for the survey. We also discussed how exactly to phrase the questions and in which form we want people to answer.

Right now, we are planning to make scales from 1 to 10 for the most answers. This choice comes not only from our own experience with creating surveys but it is also supported by the literature we’ve read on the survey creation. Other questions will include multiple answers and/or open questions where students can freely share their opinion.

We’re moving forward! Today we have discussed our MidTerm progress with our client and what we are doing next. For our digital meeting, we used Zoom which has many different functions (like sharing the screen) and it is now largely used by Maastricht University in the online studying.

This week we have quite a few meetings since the MidTerm presentation is so soon! Last night we’ve met to brainstorm some ideas about the presentation, tomorrow we will pitch it to our mentor and on Friday we meet with our client to discuss the progress and to show the presentation draft.

Introducing our team members!

Merel is a medical student, currently finishing her final clinical rotation after six years in Maastricht. Merel is excited to participate in the PREMIUM project, in preparation for "real work-life" and hopes to enhance her professional skills over the next few months. She is very excited to be involved in a group with such motivated and dedicated students.

Infographics 2:2

With this second and last picture of the planning phase, we share the specific outputs expected ahead in the Premium project journey.

Infographics 1:2

A glimpse of some back-office workflow!

We love to use many different tools in order to organize our goals: excel, word, PowerPoint and on-line resources are a daily necessity. 

Being very ambitious with our objectives, we have developed a research approach, a milestone diagram, and a three phases table in order to keep in track our goals.

However, the timeline will be our main compass. But now, we are already past the planning and ready to get started with the real work!