What we can learn from attendance data at a mathematics support centre during and after campus closures due to COVID-19

In this paper, we consider the impact of campus closures on the Mathematics Learning Centre (MLC) in Dublin City University (DCU) in the wake of COVID-19 restrictions which required online teaching. Up to March 2020, the MLC operated as an in-person drop-in service in the university’s main library. Any DCU student who needed additional mathematics support could “drop in” without making a booking in advance and get help from a tutor. There was no online provision on offer, although plans had been evolving to offer a skeleton online service in the evenings. From March 2020, and throughout the academic year 2020-21, the majority of university teaching in DCU took place completely online, as did the service offered by the MLC. By necessity, mathematics support took a different format to the previous in-person drop-in centre. Students could pre-book a 25-minute session online via Zoom with a tutor, and they could attend alone or as part of a small group as per their preference. There were no restrictions on how many sessions a student booked or how often they attended, although they were encouraged to book no more than one per day, to allow themselves time to work on the material covered in the session. Several papers have explored the practices implemented by Irish universities during the initial move to online learning in March 2020 (Hodds, 2020; Mac an Bhaird et al., 2021). Previous papers have reported on the in-person MLC attendance in DCU, and analysed trends in engagement and success rates of students who use the service (Jacob & Ní Fhloinn, 2019). However, no such analysis has been undertaken to date of engagement with the online support provision. Here, we will consider attendance patterns, with a particular focus on first year students compared to older year groups, to investigate any emerging trends. We will also discuss the knowledge gained by mathematics support providers following a full year of online provision and how this might impact future practice.