CAN 2017 Day 1

University of Exeter

University of Exeter

This paper is jointly presented by students and staff working on the project.

Aberystwyth University

Capabilities

University of Southampton

Two of Exeter’s academic Colleges have this year introduced and piloted a “Deputy Subject Chair” position, occasionally referred to as “Quality Champions”. This new role designates students to become fully trained and immersed in this side of education enhancement, and make a greater impact on behalf of the student body. In particular, this new role has already helped to embed the student voice into the programme and module accreditation process in the two Colleges piloting this role. This presentation will outline the benefits and ongoing challenges of this project, and be co-presented by staff and students from the two Colleges involved.

Co-design

University of Exeter

An Introduction to Digital Literacies class for 250 level one students on a BSc Business and Management programme was developed and run by two student peers (who have also written this paper and are presenting it at the conference). Students were surveyed immediately after the class and asked their opinion on the value of the content, and the impact of its delivery by fellow students on their level of attention and participation in class. The paper sets this experiment in the context of recent work on “co-creation” and “students as partners” as an effective means of engaging and motivating students to play a more active role in their learning.

Co-design

University of Southampton

REACT (Realising Engagement through Active Culture Transformation) is a HEFCE-funded project designed to investigate the impact of different of forms of engagement on the student experience. A special focus is on so-called  ‘hard-to-reach’ students, with the aim of embedding inclusive student engagement opportunities in the 16 participating universities. The Collaborative Development Programme has supported this aim through the organisation of events and consultancy days enabling institutional teams to adapt and develop plans and strategies and to evaluate their progress in terms of Student Engagement and reaching out to those who are less likely to engage.

Universities of Exeter, Winchester, & London Metropolitan)

This session seeks to consider the issues and opportunities from the perspectives of those who work in designing and implementing these at a local level, from transforming student ideas into projects that provide funding opportunities, to implementation, evaluation, and attempting to help change university ideas and policy.  The two presenters have experienced this both as students, with one going on to being a staff member responsible for the delivery of student experience initiatives within Birmingham CIty University.

Birmingham City University

A student-led project with a focus on digital and information literacy. Through a series of thematic workshops, we explored concepts around security and privacy, online communication and being critical of online content.  The students then submitted video applications to become Digital Leaders who would go on to develop, create and run their own ‘digital initiatives’ to pass their learning onto their peers and the wider community.

Coventry University

This workshop is for students, teachers and lifetime learners interested in ensuring the success of student partnerships through transparent communication, mutual respect, and distribution of power. The session focuses on the experiences of the student interns at UCL’s Centre for Advancing Learning and Teaching and the staff who worked with them. The interns researched and made recommendations about three major educational development initiatives occurring at the university.

University College London

The session seeks to promote the creation of a Global Student Network that underlies the vision of cultivating a ‘Silicon Valley’ spirit within UK Universities; encouraging students from distinct faculties and disciplines to team-up and explore social issues on a global scale.

The project seeks to enliven a novel teaching paradigm at Universities, whereby educational institutions bear the role to inspire students to explore their strengths and passions in pursuit of visions that may change the world.

University of Exeter

This presentation will offer insights from the collection of stories, relating them to other issues that have been highlighted through Jisc’s ongoing work on the digital experiences of learners. There will be personal contributions from two of the learners who have been involved in the study. Participants can ask questions of the lead researchers and the student co-researchers, and follow up on all twelve stories via video and online links.

Jisc, University of Southampton, Portsmouth College

The Challenge objective was to engage learners in proposing new ways of learning, teaching and assessing and improve learner experience cross college through technology using Jisc eLevator site. The project was launched during enterprising week, November 16th and 33 students proposed a total of 20 ideas. We believe sharing this practice would be of great value to other education institutions with our identified key steps, facilitating factors and pitfalls to avoid.

Epping Forest College

This program aims to recognize and reward students who have participated in the Reading Circle as mentees and wish to organize and administer the programme for new participants. The Reading Circle Programme encourages voluntary non-academic reading in supportive environments. The mentors who organize and host the Reading Circle sessions will gain transferable skills such as communicative skills, leadership, time management, survey conducting skills, IT skills and an improved sense of reflective practice.

University of Nottingham Ningbo China

International student collaboration between Multimedia Computing at the University of Westminster and Graz University of Technology, Information Systems and Computer Media (IICM) “Games Lab” to design and develop a serious game. This is extra curriculum activity aiming to expose the students to new ways of working collaboratively using online tools as it involves mainly students working remotely, but it also includes two hackathons, one at Graz, Austria and one at London, UK. The project provides a fertile environment for students to acquire technical, creative and transferable skills valuable for their professional development.

 University of Westminster

This session looks at the impact of a student-staff partnership project based on the delivery of a live brief:  students and staff from Buckinghamshire New University are working together to develop a mobile and location-sensitive ‘Heritage Trail App’ to interpret significant sites for the local district council.   This presentation by computing students and members of staff provides an overview of the experience, based on the initial analysis of data from focus groups and interviews. Findings suggest that ‘partnership’ may be usefully considered holistically to more fully capture the multiple roles and interests of partners or stakeholders. Further, among the different forms of partnership student-to-student collaboration was found to be central to successful partnership work.

Buckinghamshire New University

This presentation will give an overview of how we have increased student engagement, what we did to achieve a 50% increase in student feedback and the impact that getting better at closing the feedback loop has had on the type of feedback we get. Getting students engaged in giving feedback is only half the story, it’s what you do with it that counts, so we’ll run through some of the improvement projects that we’ve completed and that we’re currently working on not only from City Lit’s perspective but also from the point of view of one of our students.

City Lit

This workshop explores the way ethics and collaborative learning underpin a learning partnership programme enhancing both student and staff continuing professional development from the perspective of quality enhancement and digital innovation in learning and teaching. The workshop will draw on research that explores the impact of the ethical practices of this programme from the perspective of student and staff. It will be contextualised within HE practice, namely, the QAA code, newly evaluative framework proposed within the UK White Paper and HEFQE research on learning gains.

During our workshop HIPSTER will be illustrated using one of our highly successful TEL projects, which uses drones to process topographic surveys. The student co-designer will describe how she has delivered practical sessions to her peers and produced an interactive resource for course development.  Workshop attendees will be asked to share their experiences in a hands-on critical analysis of the model in order to further refine thinking in this area.

University of Worcester

The Student Engagement Partnership and Liz Thomas Associates have built a toolkit around a conceptual framework for evaluating student engagement practices. In this interactive session, we will consider the purpose, benefits and challenges of evaluating student engagement activity.

TSEP – The Student Engagement Partnership

At the University of Exeter, over 40,000 people from over 160 countries have joined our free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) to learn about Climate Change. This includes climate skeptics, GCSE students, academics and people already being impacted by the effects. This session will introduce you to online learning and describe how successful and effective partnerships were created on our MOOC, from the perspective of a student facilitator.

University of Exeter

This is an on-line portal to act as a place for students to exhibit and showcase their work; this will be predominantly music but will include visual elements too. It will offer an opportunity for ‘real world’ business experience and provide networking both between students on other programmes and with the outside world.

In this presentation, John Crossley from the University music team and Diana Stone, Student Digital Champion and first year BSc Music Technology Production student will discuss how the project came about, the key role that the Digital Champion initiative has played and talk about the project and its aims.

University of Derby

This paper will give an overview of the PLanT (Partnerships in Learning and Teaching) student engagement scheme at Reading University and will then offer an academic’s perspective on how the scheme works in practice.  I have learnt some valuable lessons on this journey and now have a clearer sense of how to embrace student engagement projects so as to make them work well. I want to share my pleasure in embracing what is, for me, a relatively new way of learning from my students.

3.2a: Cindy Becker & Joy Collier University of Reading

Our presentation is based on a student research project into Interactive Essays, a means of using digital technology to enhance summative assessments.

Four student interns are researching the ways that students respond to the assignment.   Our presentation will outline the early stages of the research and the experiences of students as researchers in the first 4 months of the project.

University Centre Blackburn College

Each year, an increasing number of summer projects result in the production of online material for teaching. The increased level of technology related projects affords the opportunity for greater levels of discussion and training around digital literacies throughout the duration of the projects.  This session will demonstrate the range of outputs and unexpected benefits of the scheme, for both students and institution. Using the particular project of ‘deaf awareness and sign language’ we will highlight the extent of the partnerships across disciplines, bodies and the public to enrich the deaf awareness training for all medical students in the institution.

My 2014 PhD study of plumbing apprenticeships revealed the plumbing curriculum was dislocated between theory and practice and consequently meaningless to many apprentices. I have been using closed Facebook groups with plumbing apprentices at City Plym as a platform for collaboration. The process of using Facebook helps plumbing apprentices to ‘respond’ and emerge as human beings, as opposed to being an object student, with an imposed curriculum, to be got through a course.

City College Plymouth

This presentation will focus initially on what strategic drivers led to the project’s inception and the processes involved in establishing an institution wide, fully embedded student engagement strategy. It will look at how we engaged students, explore the interactions and tensions between student engagement and embedding graduate attributes, and how we confronted our challenges. Centre-stage will be our student co-presenter who will explain how students perceived the project, how we worked in partnership to deliver the key aims of the work, and how she used her involvement to meet assessment criteria on her own course.

Bishop Grosseteste University

Numerical reasoning skills, used regularly within psychometric recruitment tests for graduate positions and PGCE courses, are a source of worry and panic for many students.  This presentation will outline how the peer support is structured, led and delivered by student mentors, and some of the preliminary results that have come out of this project. The main presenter will be Katie New, an MMath student who has been helping to lead the scheme for two years.

University of Exeter

This session will cover how the process of gathering and using feedback is delivered in partnership, and the different roles taken by the SU and University. It also discusses the importance of mobilising our Reps to take ownership of turnout in their areas, encouraging them to understand their importance to the research process, and empowering them as significant partners (for the SU and University) in enriching the student voice.

University of Lincoln

An aim will be for us have a clearer understanding of self-managed learning, what it can offer students and how it can re-shape our programmes, our roles as teachers and the Business School as an ‘education provider.’  We will also enable you to think through how the approach may be applied to a module or programme you are currently working with.