Speakers: Ruth Churchill Dower, PhD Student at Manchester Metropolitan University
When did you first receive Glean and were there any key challenges you wanted help with?
Ruth Churchill Dower: Hi, I'm Ruth from Manchester Metropolitan University. I started using Glean about 3 years ago when I started my PhD, and I found it was incredibly useful for recording seminars and conference presentations, particularly, because it enabled me to have a look back at the transcription afterwards, and just to take things slowly in my own time.
Ruth Churchill Dower: So it kind of brought me a bit of thinking time if you like.
How has using Glean impacted your learning experience and how quickly did you notice this impact?
Ruth Churchill Dower: I was returning to higher education much later on after a career in arts education.
Ruth Churchill Dower: It was quite a shock in many ways, a bit of a culture shock, to come back into the university, as you can imagine.
Ruth Churchill Dower: What was absolutely brilliant for me was that Glean enabled me to just process the learning that was happening and to to stop myself feeling overwhelmed by all of the information that I had to take in.
Ruth Churchill Dower: For me it was a fantastic tool to help reduce my stress levels, to find a little bit of a better work-life balance.
Ruth Churchill Dower: I did have time to take these issues in. I did have time to reread things, to go back over, the preparation that I'd done for seminars and see where there were gaps in my learning or where there were things that I hadn't quite understood, and to become a little bit more confident that there were other ways of learning. That perhaps weren't immediately obvious in the institution in a classroom environment, but through the Glean environment enabled me to just take it at my own time and process things gradually. So for an oldie like me, that was really important and a very valuable way of organizing my time and my learning.
Would you recommend Glean to other students?
Ruth Churchill Dower: I would highly recommend it to other students. not only is it a fantastic way of just slowing your own brain down and just stopping feeling overwhelmed
Ruth Churchill Dower: But it's also a brilliant way of feeling like you're in control, like you're able to organize your learning.
Ruth Churchill Dower: You can just sit back and immerse yourself in the content of that session. You can give yourself entirely over to listening to what's being said or to enabling your brain to start thinking of those key ideas that are going to help your dissertation or your thesis.
Ruth Churchill Dower: So that's been an absolute lifesaver for me, and it's just enabled me to, as I say, thoroughly become absorbed and immersed in the content of the learning session. And that's such a stress reliever. I can't tell you to be able to actually enjoy the teaching that's taking place is fabulous.
