Are you interested in student co-creation but unsure of the benefits, how to get involved or where to start?
If so, you might be interested in reading my review of the recent AdvanceHE symposium on Student Co-creation, which includes highlights from the event, variations and benefits of student co-creation, scholarship and the student’s voice.
The day was packed with insightful, exciting and innovative talks from international colleagues and students across the HE Sector. There was such an exciting buzz in the air all day and you couldn’t help but admire the enthusiasm from students passionate about working with educators and developing agency in their own learning experiences.
Keynote Speaker: Catherine Bovill, University of Edinburgh
The day began with Catherine talking passionately about ‘The transformational potential of co-creation from a classroom perspective both in person and online. She spoke of the many variations of student co-creation, highlighting some of her own research and scholarship along the way. Catherine shared a Co-creation of learning & teaching typology (Bovill 2019) which identifies how you might initiate co-creation, within what context and whether those sorts of activities are staff-led, student-led or both – some included in the table below:
Paper available from A co-creation of learning and teaching typology: What kind of co-creation are you planning or doing? (Bovill 2019)
Interestingly, this research mainly focused on students co-creating when they are already part of a programme or module – with activities such as co-creating assessments, designing essay questions or working with students to co-design what might be taught in coming weeks.
From the research undertaken by Catherine, and other scholars she mentioned, there are clearly a lot of benefits of student co-creation for students and staff, some of which I’ve noted below:
Increased student engagement and motivation for learning
Increased meta-cognitive awareness, sense of identity and belonging
Enhancements in teaching and classroom experience
Enhanced academic performance
Transformation in assessment performance and less focus on grades and more on learning
Enhanced feelings of belonging, feeling valued
More culturally responsive and inclusive
Liberating for teachers
Increased confidence through relationship building and trust
For me that last point on relationship building and developing trust are the key ingredients to any form of curriculum co-creation, whether that’s student-staff co-creation or staff-staff co-creation, both require positive relationships but also build positive relationships – which then leads to all those other benefits above!
Bovill, C. (2020) Co-creating learning and teaching: towards relational teaching in higher education. St Albans: Critical Publishing.Bovill, C. (2019)
A co-creation of learning and teaching typology: what kind of co-creation are you planning or doing? International Journal for Students as Partners3 (2) 91-98: https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i2.3953
Student Co-creation at Newcastle
As my role focuses on working with specific programme teams to redesign or design new curricula, I was interested in finding out how colleagues across the sector have engaged students in new programme design – a particular challenge when students aren’t already invested in the programme. I managed to catch Catherine during a coffee break to chat about this and was comforted that this isn’t just a challenge for us, it’s a sector-wide challenge. From our chat I’ve identified some approaches that we could use at Newcastle:
Organise staff, student and graduate panel discussions as part of the curriculum review process
Provide money incentives – involve students from the outset through schemes such as Jobs on Campus
Provide other incentives – if the budget doesn’t stretch to Jobs on Campus, would a Digital Badge incentivise students to get involved? There is robust meta-data behind these badges that employers recognise as authentic
What I realised from this symposium, and from being around all these enthusiastic students, is students are eager to get involved in shaping their own education. Student co-creation in any variation can have positive benefits not just for the students and educators but for the University as a whole.
Excitingly, we also had representation for Newcastle University at the AdvanceHE symposium. Helen Elliott, our Student Experience Manager and Meg Hardiman a second-year student in English Literature with Creative Writing, presented their work on ‘Why Can’t Module Choice be More like Netflix?’
Their work focused on finding out what information students need to make a confident choice during module selection. A student co-creation project that used Agile Methodologies.
Here at Newcastle, we have some great examples of student co-creation:
In LTDS we are working on developing support and guidance on student co-creation and would love to include some of your case studies, so if you have examples do get in touch ltds@ncl.ac.uk
Parallel sessions – what stood out!
There were of course many other motivating and interesting sessions at the Student Co-creation symposium. I was particularly inspired by the student co-creation examples from The University of Manchester, and the University of Dundee.
Dr Nicholas Weise (Senior Lecturer / Teaching & Learning Enhancement Lead –Department of Chemistry) shared their approach to co-creating the curriculum with Commuter students (a student group that has lower rates of progression and success than other student groups) so that they feel less isolated, feel seen and heard and are able to engage in more social and networking opportunities. Through a flipped teaching environment students were given the opportunity to co-design active learning sessions and have a voice in designing aspects of the curriculum, such as learning outcomes, lecture content, and formative and summative assessments. What really caught my attention was how they rewarded and recognised student contributions. The University of Manchester has set up a programme, the Leadership in Education Awards Programme (LEAP) for all students (UG, PGT and PGR) and is supporting students, involved in co-designing curriculum, to gain recognition as Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).
Dr James Brooks (Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering and the Academic Lead for Pedagogy within Science and Engineering) at Manchester University talked about student involvement in co-designing a course from scratch with student partners. The extent of the involvement in the co-design had real positive impacts on the students, their experience and their grades. James’ students gave summaries of past material in the lectures, live constructive criticism of the lecture, and formal and informal peer feedback on assessments. They co-designed the marking criteria in the lectures, specified the grade descriptors in the lectures and created learning materials to evidence their learning – some really great examples of engaging students in their own learning experiences and assessments!
Dr Paul Campbell (Physics Division, University of Dundee) perhaps won the award for the most innovative and fun example of student co-creation (there wasn’t actually an award for that but he’d of won, I’m sure 😊). Inspired some time ago by The Apprentice, students on a Physic module are tasked with working in groups (typically of 5 or 6 students) to:
Develop a 4/5 minute YouTube video that ‘informs, educates and entertains’* on one aspect of this module.
Exercise represents 10% of the overall module score.
Hard deadline set at the last scheduled class slot of that 11 week academic term.
Marking scheme provided [including a peer assessment component].
Students then take complete creative control.
Students really got creative with these videos and had lots of fun, and the benefits were clear, including:
Improved Subject Attainment.
Enhanced Student Experience.
Enhanced employability (URL link to CV).
Cultivation of true team working and identification of distinct employment roles.
There are also a lot of benefits for educators:
Improved attainment.
Inexpensive in terms of facilitation of kit and time investment.
Fabulous recruitment tool.
Facilitates true insight to both academic and character traits that serve towards generating accurate job references with demonstrable excellence.
Also serves towards the development of rapport and enhanced confidence in the senior phase
Take look at one of the videos on Youtube and see what you think!
Thanks for taking the time and reading my blog post on student co-creation. Please get in touch if you are interested in chatting about student co-creation or in sharing your practice!
Michelle Barr, Learning Design & Curriculum Development Advisor (LTDS)
The blog post was written by Dr Lucy Hatt, Senior Lecturer in Leadership at Newcastle University Business School.
Have you ever wondered how many places you can be at once? Before Covid19 lockdown homeworking, the most places we could manage to be at once was two. Unless we happened to be a Time Lord, most of us could only be in one place physically, and perhaps another place mentally, at the same time.
However, online learning requires us to inhabit a third space – the digital space. As well as the incongruence and mental stress that’s created by being physically at home and mentally at work, we need to be present on-line in the digital space too. And, in order for our students to engage fully in on-line learning, we need to support and encourage every student to establish a digital residence as well as a physical residence.
Dave White, Head of Digital Learning at the University of Arts, London, researches the phenomenon of digital residency and came up with a framework to describe and analyse people’s approach to online spaces. In this framework, we can choose to be present professionally and personally online across a continuum that ranges from visitor to resident.
Take Gemma, a fictional student of a post-graduate executive education programme. In her professional role as marketing manager, Gemma is a visitor of the digital space, seeing it as a collection of tools she can use to gather information useful to get a particular job done. However, in her personal life, she has created a digital residence in the form of her Facebook and Twitter posts and in Zoom calls with her friends and family. In her personal life, Gemma sees the web as a series of spaces or places where she chooses to be present with other people.
When we are in the digital space in “visitor mode”, we leave no deliberate social trace of ourselves. We might be searching for information on Google, reading product reviews, watching videos, shopping, or “lurking” on social media reading the posts of other people. When we are in the digital space “in resident mode” we are living out a portion of our lives online. We leave a social trace, which remains when we go offline. To be a digital resident requires a digital identity, which we create and develop by making social media posts, participating in discussion boards, making comments, giving reviews and feedback and responding quickly to direct messages.
In order for our students to engage fully in the learning experience, as educators we need to engage with them in all four quadrants of the framework. In order to encourage digital visitors, our digital learning platforms need to be aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate, so our visitors can easily gather the information they need. In the past, we have contented ourselves with students who are digital visitors, because we have been able to engage more fully with them when we have shared the physical space of the classroom.
However, now Covid19 has restricted that possibility at least in the short to medium term, we need understand how to encourage and support our students to be digital residents too. If our students only “visit” online learning spaces rather than residing in them, we are failing to engage them fully. Learning is likely to be more superficial and less transformational – and altogether less satisfactory. We need to find ways to allow and encourage our learners to develop a digital identity in which they feel safe to integrate their “shoes-off” self and establish digital residency.
We can do this by such behaviours as acknowledging, sharing and relating to domestic intrusions, encouraging “off grid” student WhatsApp groups, having regular check-ins at the start and end of synchronous teaching sessions, using music and ambient sounds, integrating wellbeing activities, incorporating playful tasks and maintaining a sense of humour. In order for professional learners to integrate their work identities, its important to design activities that require the integration of theory and practice, perhaps reflecting on how theory has informed practice encouraging students to identify opportunities to use practice to develop their theoretical understanding.
As with many of the ways that Covid19 has forced us to change our educational practices; being aware of the various ways our learners engage with the digital space will benefits that will last long after we get back into the classroom. Recognising and valuing the “reality” of the digital space will enable us all to establish our own digital residence more consciously, and in doing so, we will encourage more learner engagement and become better educators.
Thanks to Dr Helen Webster, Head of the Writing Development Centre, Newcastle University, whose presentation in the HaSS Education Community Room, introduced us to the work of Dave White on Digital Residence, and to Rosalind Beaumont and Dr Tracy Scurry who lead the HaSS Education Community Room.
