A UK institution

Information for institutions

Prepare for Success can be used for non commercial educational purposes by UK receiving institutions and sending institutions outside the UK. It may be used to enhance a UK institution's pre-arrival support package for its international students or a sending institution's pre-departure support.

Download How to use Prepare for Success with international students: A guide for UK institutions (pdf, 331kb). You may wish to print this document.

Please help us to continue to improve Prepare for Success by completing this feedback form on how you use it:

Feedback form for institutions

Design of Prepare for Success

Prepare for Success contains 22 individual learning resources, each of which aims to provide between 20 and 40 minutes of activity-based learning. Activities include interactive quizzes and listening tasks involving short audio and video clips of university staff and students speaking about aspects of life and study in the UK. The range of topics covered aims to familiarise students with cultural and practical matters as well as aspects of academic life in the UK.

The development of Prepare for Success has been funded by the Prime Minister's Initiative for International Education through UKCISA (the UK Council for International Student Affairs). This development has been undertaken by a team based in Modern Languages at the University of Southampton with expertise in the design and development of online courses and e-learning materials, created in the form of activity-based Learning Objects (LOs).

These LOs share some key design features. They:

  • are created as html web pages supported by different media
  • are standalone, separate items of a similar size
  • focus on a learning concept or topic
  • are activity-based (students 'learn by doing')
  • contain interactive activities employing a range of task types (e.g. drag and drop, multiple choice)
  • combine learning material in different media (video, audio, text, image)
  • provide considerable help, feedback and review to support students' learning
  • employ a consistent style, making them easy for students to use

Options for use

Prepare for Success may be used in different ways by institutions:

Institutions can link to the whole resource from an institutional or departmental homepage, OR to selected pages (i.e. individual learning objects) from WITIHIN their own VLE courses. In this way, links to individual items can sit side by side with an institution's own resources embedded in a VLE. N.B. Such links need to be set up from the LOs on the Prepare for Success homepage and not from those accessed through the 'study pathways' page.