Creativity and Collaboration: An Exploration of Empathy, Inclusion, and Resilience in Co-Creation of the Curriculum

The call for papers for a special issue highlighting creativity in higher education practices inspired me to write an article drawing out the many interesting facets of creativity within co-creation of the curriculum. I enjoyed leading a discussion session today focused on the paper at the St Mary's University Festival of Learning and Teaching with this year's theme focusing specifically on co-creation of the curriculum. Thank you to the participants and chair for a fascinating discussion!

The article abstract, link to the full open access paper, and discussion questions from the session are shared below.

Abstract
This research article uses an inductive approach to analyse the nuanced nature of creativity within co-creation of the curriculum in higher education. Co-creation of the curriculum is one form of engagement in learning and teaching in which students and staff work in partnership so that each has a voice and a stake in curriculum development. Using qualitative research methods, this research focuses on the creative practices of co-creation of the curriculum and draws new connections between student engagement, creativity, and authenticity in learning and teaching. Themes that are explored include: (A) innovation through dialogue and collaboration within the community, (B) play and creatively trying new things despite risks, (C) enjoyment of creative learning and teaching, (D) shared ownership leading to intrinsic motivation and creativity, and (E) creatively challenging the status quo. The author suggests that it is the inclusive processes and products of creativity within co-creation of the curriculum that helps students and staff to develop essential skills and attributes – such as confidence, empathy, and resilience – that help them engage in authentic learning and teaching experiences and learn to cope with supercomplexity in today’s ever-changing world.

Read the full article: Creativity and Collaboration: An Exploration of Empathy, Inclusion, and Resilience in Co-Creation of the Curriculum in the Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal.

Reflective Essay: Co-Researching Co-Creation of the Curriculum

Last year, I shared on this blog some of my reflections on co-researching co-creation of the curriculum and my experiences of working with students as partners as part of my PhD research in this area. After this time, I was thrilled that Hermina Simoni wanted to carry on this partnership work by writing a reflective essay about our experiences of using arts-based methods together, and that she shared with me about co-production in her subject area of health care. I learnt a lot throughout this collaborative work, and I'm thrilled to now share our work in our new publication.

Co-researching co-creation of the curriculum: Reflections on arts-based methods in education and connections to healthcare co-production
International Journal of Students as Partners

Summary of our reflective essay:
Our research explores how students and staff can both benefit from participating actively in partnerships in higher education. Through qualitative research employing focus group discussions with students and then with staff, participants suggest a plethora of practices of co-creation of curriculum whilst also reflecting on benefits and challenges. The inclusion of two student consultants as co-researchers added another layer to this research project by engaging students as partners in learning and bringing multiple voices to the research collection, analysis, and dissemination processes. The inclusion of undergraduate student co-researchers’ perspectives offers a mirror in which we can observe what is needed to foster effective co-creation of the curriculum in higher education. This reflective essay illustrates perspectives about our experiences of engaging in this collaborative research using deliberative democratic methodology. The scope of this paper is to provide an informative picture about our experiences, draw connections with co-creation of healthcare, and encourage similar partnerships in education and beyond.

I hope you enjoy reading the full reflective essay via the IJSaP website.

Challenging the Status Quo to Embed Partnership

This year I have been analysing my PhD research data and have been delighted to have opportunities to share, discuss, and receive feedback on my initial findings. In particular, I began 2017 by leading the workshop 'Exploring Power: Democratisation of Knowledge through Co-production' a conference on co-production at the University of Glasgow and I presented 'Co-creation of the Curriculum: The Juicy Challenges and Clear Benefits' at the TSEP conference in London (see my Publications and Presentations page for further details).

Presenting at these conferences helped me reflect more about some of the initial research findings relating to the challenges and benefits of co-creation of the curriculum in higher education. This informed my work on a research article for the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change with the theme of Embedding the Culture of Engagement.

I'm thrilled that my work on the research article 'Co-Creation of the Curriculum: Challenging the Status Quo to Embed Partnership' for this special issue has now been published. The abstract is below, and I hope you enjoy reading it. I look forward to any continued discussions about it via Twitter or email!

Many individuals in the higher education sector claim that co-creation of the curriculum is an innovative process of student engagement in which students and staff members become partners in curriculum development. This research analyses rare instances of co-creation of the curriculum in the Scottish higher education sector to understand individuals’ different conceptualisations of this collaborative teaching and learning practice. The researcher interviewed ten academic members of staff and ten students who participated in co-creation of the curriculum in Scotland to analyse their perspectives of the benefits as well as the challenges of this form of active student engagement. Staff and students participating in co-creation of the curriculum encounter such challenges as staff and students taking on different responsibilities, increased time and effort involved and institutional inertia as they challenge the status quo. This paper will explore how individuals have overcome these challenges to embed partnership and achieve strong benefits of co-creation of the curriculum, including shared ownership and the engagement of both students and staff in the learning community and their increased satisfaction and professional development resulting from working in partnership.

Read the full article.

Connecting with Other Junior Researchers - JURE

This week I have enjoyed the fantastic opportunity to participate in the JURE conference for Junior Researchers of EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) in Tampere, Finland! It was a great experience to meet, network with, and learn from PhD colleagues in education from all across the world whilst also being the only student at the conference representing the University of Edinburgh.

JURE provided a great programme of academic and social activities to help early career researchers get to know each other and exchange ideas. On Saturday, I enjoyed taking part in the JURE walking tour of Tampere, starting at the City Hall, progressing through the historic market, and passing local Schools. It was really interesting to hear about the Finnish outdoor nurseries where children stay outdoors all day long, as well as the early language-learning at primary schools. The tour then headed up the nearby hill through a beautiful forest to the highest part of the city where you can see views over the two lakes (on either side of the city) and also enjoy the quaint café which is known for the best doughnuts in the city. They were indeed delicious! We finished the day at a local restaurant later in the evening where it was great to meet others who had been arriving throughout the day ahead of the conference.

After many months of preparations for JURE from submitting my abstract last autumn, my article last winter, and my peer review last spring, it was fantastic to present my paper during a higher education strand of sessions. I introduced models of student/staff partnerships and my emerging model of the variables of co-creation of the curriculum, as well as my initial findings of staff and students’ perceptions of the benefits of participating in co-creation of the curriculum projects at Scottish universities. The paper was well received, with interesting questions to delve more into the nature of the co-creation projects, selection of student participants, how ‘success’ was measured, the nature of student/staff dialogue, and any correlations with student achievement. Presenting also led to great conversations with a PhD student from Spain who researches co-creation of grading rubrics in universities and with a student from Canada who wants to start similar research on co-creation of the curriculum.

Throughout the conference, I really enjoyed participating in a variety of sessions. The roundtable discussions were a particularly interesting format, with PhD students presenting only a five-minute overview of their project plans and leading a discussion to receive feedback from others and brainstorm solutions to any issues they were wrestling with. I really liked this more interactive format that promoted collaboration amongst early career researchers. I feel that other conferences and also University departments could benefit from offering such sessions to promote more discussion and shared problem-solving amongst new researchers to help them with planning their research design or wrestling with difficult questions during the analysis.

The other presentations which most interested me focused on student motivation, agency, critical thinking skills, and academic achievement. A particularly interesting presentation was testing various flipped classroom models to promote students’ systematic creativity, inventive thinking, and satisfaction with a Finnish engineering course. The researcher found that the transition to blended learning can be difficult for both students and staff members, since the increased or different workload model can negatively affect attitudes and participation. Another very interesting presentation was on different online learning designs and how they affect different levels of student engagement, satisfaction, and pass rates; unfortunately, there were no conclusive results from the analysis of the fifty-five different learning designs. It seemed that the majority of participants were conducting quantitative, positivist studies into the psychology of education, and I was surprised how few other participants used qualitative methods or other research methodologies. Since the UK model of PhD study focuses on conducting research and writing one, cumulative thesis, I was also surprised that the majority of other participants (mostly PhD students from continental European or Scandinavian countries) were participating in a PhD by publication model.

Learning how much other PhD colleagues were publishing, I was especially motivated to participate in the Writing for International Scholarly Journals workshop at the conference which was led by an editor in chief and a representative from a large publisher. It was extremely beneficial that they provided so many tangible tips for writing strong journal articles that will be accepted into good journals, and they were also extremely accessible by answering many questions about the process. I also participated in an introduction to meta-analysis workshop on how to conduct statistical analysis of a large collection of results from individual studies – I was not familiar with this and it was a good opportunity to push myself to learn about this new area at JURE whilst there was the opportunity.

I was thrilled to participate in the JURE conference, meet other junior researchers from around the world, present my research, and learn more about the Finnish culture and education system which is world-renounced. It was beneficial to learn from the various presentations, workshops, and discussions over the past few days to help me reflect more on my PhD student journey, and it was wonderful to be supported by the Principal’s Go Abroad Fund from the University of Edinburgh to support me in this great opportunity. It was an educational trip but also fun to explore Tampere and Helsinki, as well as the Finnish food!

Teaching Award Research: What does Teaching Excellence Look Like to Students?

This work was later published in a research article in Teaching in Higher Education - learn more.

At Edinburgh University Students’ Association, I am proud to coordinate the longest-running student-led Teaching Awards in the UK. These Teaching Awards are an extremely valuable part of the Students’ Association’s work in partnership with the University of Edinburgh to reinforce our positive partnership. I work with the Students’ Association Marketing team and School Offices to promote the Teaching Awards, normally receiving 2,000 - 3,000 student nominations annually for teachers, tutors, supervisors and support staff. I also organise the prestigious awards ceremony for shortlisted university staff each year. In addition, my team sends each of the University’s twenty Schools a report including a list of all nominees and the anonymised student nomination comments for their School. However, staff did not previously have the time to engage well with these long reports.

Therefore, I initiated a research project analysing the extensive qualitative data collected through the student-led Teaching Awards nominations in order to understand student perceptions of excellence in teaching and student support. After gaining a small grant from the University of Edinburgh Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS), I hired a postgraduate student as a research assistant who analysed all of the 2,926 Teaching Awards nominations collected during the 2014-15 academic year. Four key themes were identified:  1) concerted, visible effort; 2) charisma, personality and engaging teaching;   3) breaking down student-teacher barriers and fostering student engagement; 4) consistency, predictability and stability of support.

The Research Assistant, Vice-President Academic Affairs, and I worked together to produce and disseminate the research report 'What Does Good Teaching Look Like to Students?', which was launched on 1 December 2016 and is publicly available on our website. The report discusses the nuances of the four key themes that were identified in the research, and it shares examples of best practice activities digestible way to highlight practices that surfaced in the close reading of the students’ Teaching Awards nominations. By sharing research findings in a digestible way, it is hoped that staff will incorporate more of these engaging teaching methods and partnership work with students into their work. Especially with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and a stronger reliance on quantitative data to demonstrate teaching excellence, this initiative shows the importance of understanding the nuances within the vast qualitative data from student-led Teaching Awards to identify student perceptions of teaching excellence and consequently enhance the student experience.

Student-led Teaching Awards generally demonstrate the partnership between Edinburgh University Students’ Association and the University of Edinburgh to recognise and reward excellent teaching and student support. In particular, this project demonstrated a strong partnership since the University’s small grant funded the research assistant position and allowed the Students’ Association to progress this work. University staff were keen to learn about the research findings and disseminate the best practices in teaching and student support that we identified through this project.

The project has been extremely well received at the University of Edinburgh and beyond. The report was launched online on 1 December, 2016 and at a launch event attended by 60 University staff. In semesters 1 and 2 of this academic year, we disseminated the research findings in presentations at the Institute for Academic Development’s Course Organiser Network, Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice courses for new academic staff, Moray House Graduate School of Education seminar series, and the University’s Gearing Up conference. This summer, I have shared our work beyond the University at the Quality Assurance Agency Scotland’s Enhancement Themes conference and the Higher Education Academy’s annual conference.

It has been exciting to receive a very positive reception to this project, leading to other interesting projects. Within the University of Edinburgh, we have started having more conversations about the Teaching Awards recommendations provided at the end of the report concerning academic community for students and staff, including students as partners in pedagogical discussions, being aware of staff workload and reasonable expectations for them, support for postgraduate tutors and personal tutors, and implications of potential student biases in nominating women staff and staff from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, I am now involved in supporting another PTAS project led by the Medical School on best practices of dialogue and presentation of feedback to students, extending our previous project and analysing samples of anonymised feedback given by markers whom students have recognised for their outstanding feedback.

Beyond Edinburgh University Students’ Association, it is also exciting to see how many other student unions which already run student-led Teaching Awards are interested in conducting similar research projects to analyse the themes within teaching and student support highlighted by students in their nomination comments. In particular, colleagues at the University of Stirling Students’ Union and at the Manchester Met Students’ Union look like they will be taking forward similar projects this year. It is great that there is interest in conducting similar qualitative research like ours. We do recognise that this can be very time-intensive and resource-intensive, and we don’t have the capacity to analyse the trends across all of each year’s nomination comments. However, we have been able to use the themes identified from the research in the nomination forms to give students the opportunity to self-code up to three key reasons why they are submitting their nomination for the best teachers at the University. It has been really helpful having this additional, quantitative follow-up data. We hope other unions that might not have the capacity to do a full, qualitative analysis may at least be able to take more of this light-touch approach.

This research project and its dissemination have been a creative, enjoyable way for me to go beyond the provision of the Teaching Awards project to support learning and teaching by analysing and sharing the thematic trends in the nomination comments by understanding student perceptions of how they learn best and how they evaluate effective teaching. This research helped me to better understand and respect individual learners’ stories about the obstacles and struggles that they have personally overcome during their academic study with the support of staff, as well as the themes arising from the data from our diverse student bodies and learning communities across the university.

I have especially enjoyed that the Teaching Awards research project has connected my role at the students’ association with my PhD research into teaching excellence and innovative practices of student engagement, including student/staff partnerships. It has helped me to take an evidence-informed approach by engaging more with higher education theory, literature, and practices around teaching excellence as I have shared the work widely across the University of Edinburgh and at other conferences. I also worked to engage deeply with the teaching excellence literature when writing an academic journal article on this research which I submitted for review in May 2017, and I hope it can be published in due course. Stay tuned!

By conducting these presentations and in particularly by facilitating workshops (for instance my presentation and workshop slides from the HEA conference) that help participants (and myself) explore further the student perceptions of teaching excellence, I have been able to look at the wider implications of this research. Student welfare, struggles with ill mental health, and resilience are some interesting areas that have been raised by this research. However, the resulting issues of sometimes time-consuming student support have knock-on effects for staff members’ welfare and what students should reasonably expect from staff. The workshop that I facilitated at the HEA conference in particular resulted in fascinating discussions about students’ expectations, and how they would reasonably change between Year 1 and Year 4, as well as subsequent postgraduate study at university. It would be interesting to look closer at the data to see if there are any thematic trends in student perceptions of teaching excellence stemming from different demographics such as year of study, subject of study, and home/international students. This project generally has been very exciting and interesting intellectually to engage more with staff by sharing the research, and hopefully it will have a positive implication on quality enhancement by sharing tangible teaching and student practices that students have recognised, and rewarded.

This later work was published in a research article in Teaching in Higher Education.

Reflections on Co-Researching Co-Creation of the Curriculum

In my application for Innovative Initiative Grant funding for a project researching student and staff perceptions of co-creation of the curriculum, I felt an innovative aspect of this project could be involving students as research consultants. Their role was to contribute the student perspective to analysis of the student focus group data, and to help co-lead the focus groups for academic members of staff. Therefore, I would be able to experience an element of co-creation within my research on this subject, so it was particularly relevant and topical. I was delighted to receive the small grant which would enable me to compensate the Student Consultants a bit for their work. This project was also accepted to be presented at the Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland (sparqs) conference in March 2017, so another great opportunity arose at that conference for the students to co-present the work together with me.

I wasn’t nervous before leading the student focus groups with student representatives since this was not too dissimilar to other events I run at the Students’ Association to contribute to student representatives’ training and skills development. This time, though, I was excited to share my own work and the area of student/staff partnerships in co-creating the curriculum with them since I wanted to share this interest and I thought many would be interested in this idea. What I was nervous about ahead of the focus groups was in how to present the Student Consultant opportunity. What if no one was interested?

Risk is a theme that has been arising in my qualitative data from interviews I previously conducted with both staff and students who have participated in co-creation of the curriculum. Staff felt a sense of risk that students would not engage with their work, and another sense of risk in not knowing the direction of their collaborative work to develop an aspect of the curriculum together since this would depend on the ideas and consensus within the group. Furthermore, students can feel a sense of risk in taking more ownership over their learning, feeling more accountable to the learning community than in traditional courses, and not knowing what to expect from this non-traditional teaching. However, it was interesting for me to feel this sense of risk and nervousness myself while I wondered if any students would want to work with me on the project. If they didn’t, then a core aspect of my ‘innovative’ project would not work and it would no longer be very novel. Therefore, I put in quite some time into designing a handout to promote the role and getting the wording right so it was clear yet hopefully enticing and not over-promising anything or asking too much of the students.  

Luckily for me, I had five students email me to express their interest in the two Student Consultant roles. It was a difficult decision because all of the student focus group participants had provided valuable contributions, and especially these students. Two students in particular wrote about how much they had enjoyed the project, what they could contribute to it, and what skills and experience they felt they could gain by participating – I offered them the roles but it was difficult turning the other students down.

We have now met once to co-analyse the focus group data, after finally finding a time we could all meet. We had all read through the transcripts of the two focus groups (about 20 pages each!) and the students had been very conscientious in their preparations and notes about their reflections which led to a valuable discussion. We had very similar interpretations of the data relating to students’ aims in higher education, students’ views of effective teaching, and their perspectives on student engagement. All of us had been surprised that the first focus group (which neither of them had been a part of) had been a bit negative about the idea of co-creation of the curriculum. Several participants in that focus group had complained about the heavy workload of preparing ahead of a flipped classroom experience, they felt there was no benefit in attending if they did not have time to prepare adequately, and even when they had prepared some of these students had felt that the discussion was too ‘out of the box’. Both the Student Consultants and I were surprised that these participants had previously spoken about the need for students to take responsibility for their learning experience; furthermore, they had voiced the view that effective teachers should adapt to students’ interests and act on students’ feedback to improve the course as it takes place. Therefore, we felt it was contradictory that these participants had highlighted many challenges to co-creation of the curriculum when, in other parts of the discussion, it seemed that they would have benefited from and enjoyed experiencing co-creation of the curriculum. By contrast, the second student focus group (which both Student Consultants had been part of) was generally very positive about the opportunities that co-creation present.

We are still analysing the focus group data, and we are preparing for leading the two focus groups with staff on 10 and 13 March. One of the Student Consultants has volunteered to create the short PowerPoint sharing the general consensus from the student focus groups, which will be presented after the staff share their perspectives so that we can discuss the comparison. My first gut reaction was to think ‘What if the presentation isn’t good?’ but immediately I felt that it would be ok since part of the process of co-creation is letting go of ownership over the direction of the project. From what I hear from staff who have done this, often the students go above and beyond the staff members’ expectations and produce exceptionally high-quality work when they’re given this opportunity. If they don’t, then we can have a productive discussion and give each other feedback to improve the presentation, but I’m confident I’ll be pleasantly surprised by the output. We’ll see!

Update: read more about our presentation and experiences at the sparqs conference.

Tips for Creating Open Badges

After I first heard about Open Badges two summers ago, I was keen to adopt them into my work in academic engagement at Edinburgh University Students’ Association and over this time the project has been extremely successful. Open Badges are flexible, free, digital forms of accreditation that are full of information (metadata) about what individuals have done to earn them. They are open source and hundreds of organisations and companies around the world use them. The Open Badge scheme I set up at Edinburgh University Students’ Association was the first Scottish higher education scheme, but now increasing numbers of universities across the UK and around the world are adopting them – the more Open Badges are used, the more widely recognised and valuable they will become.

This past year I have tried to share my experiences of setting up an Open Badge scheme with as many people as possible within the higher education community. I have published a case study about my experiences of setting up and piloting Open Badges, led workshops at conferences to help others learn how to incorporate Open Badges into their own work, and responded to many enquiries from individuals across the country.

I now want to consolidate all of my tips in one place, so keep reading to see my advice!

Clarify Your Aims: How Will Open Badges Benefit Students and How Will they Benefit Staff?
I have found that Open Badges have a large number of benefits, but it’s important to be clear about how they benefit students (i.e., why they should bother earning them) and how they benefit staff at your organisation (i.e., why it’s worth the effort to develop them). Below are examples of benefits relating to the support I give to Class Reps at the Students’ Association.

Benefits for Students:

• Better understanding all aspects of the role, and serving as stepping stones to the Edinburgh award for representing students
• Reflecting on and documenting their work
• Sharing best practices with Reps in other schools who may be working on similar issues
• Sharing their work & successes with the students they represent (see examples of anonymised blog posts on our Schools pages in the ‘news’ tab for each)
• Earning open badges and adding them to their LinkedIn profiles

Benefits for the Students’ Association:

• Fewer questions about the Class Rep role and, in particular, what activities are part of the Edinburgh Award for Reps
• Learning more about the local work of Reps in their School (there are over 2,000 Reps at Edinburgh University who work locally within subject areas and Schools)
• Learning more about the impact of the student Rep role on students’ personal and professional development
• Having access to fantastic blog posts that we can include on our Schools webpages
• Providing a new form of recognition for our Reps who are volunteers (see more in the sparqs accreditation report – my example of Open Badges is on pages 10- 12)

Think About the Bigger Picture: Develop Clear Criteria and a Framework for Your Badges
While you can create a one-off Open Badge, it’s best to think about the bigger picture: will your Open Badges be part of a framework for your activity, or within a bigger framework with your organisation? You should have a think about what activities you want to incentivise students to take part in and make sure this fits in with the benefits you aim to have for your scheme. If others within your organisation also offer Open Badges, how will your scheme fit in (separately or together?) and will it be the same level of difficulty to earn badges offered by different areas of your organisation?

For Class Reps, you can see the image above of the many activities we see as part of the Class Rep role. When students earn three badges in one category, they will earn that category-level badge. When they earn all three category-level badges, they will earn the Class Rep Gold Badge. Based on feedback from students we didn’t create a bronze, silver, and gold scheme since students didn’t like the idea of going from all being equal to suddenly being in a tiered scheme. We wanted to give Class Reps lots of choice and flexibility so we developed these broader categories.

For the criteria, we usually required students to use a blog post to explain: what they did and what the impact was for themselves and/or others. For example, in the Implementing Change badge acknowledges the Class Reps who schedule individual meetings with University staff members to bring their peers’ concerns forward and find potential solutions. Students will have to write up a brief report on their work implementing change, including:                      

• the problems they raised with the staff member                                                   
• the solutions they proposed     
• staff response and action                                                                         
• how the Rep communicated with other students to let them know about the positive changes that were implemented (or the reasons why the idea could not be implemented)

Learn How the Technology will Work for You
Open Badges can be ‘triggered’ by different things. In my understanding, there are three ways to issue an Open Badge:

• Successful completion of an online quiz or online module (automatic badge release upon minimum threshold grade being achieved – we use this for when students earn over 80% on our Class Rep online training quiz and they earn the online training badge)
• Participation in an event, training, conference, etc. (manual grade centre updates to trigger badges – we use this to input attendance into our virtual learning environment to issue the intermediate training badge)
• Graded blog posts (manual grading is needed here and we have student staff members help with this, but we use a grading scheme as simple such as 0 for not meeting badge criteria and 1 for meeting the criteria and issuing the badge)

There is different technology to issue Open Badges, including many virtual learning environments such as Blackboard and Moddle. You can also use Cred.ly and Wordpress’ Cred.ly plugin, although I’m not familiar with how that works. Edinburgh University uses Blackboard where Open Badges are an Achievement (find them in Course Tools -> Achievements area -> Create Achievement). I’d recommend the ‘milestone’ or ‘completion’ options for Open Badges.

Before setting them up, make sure you have:

• a good name for each badge that students and others outside your organisation (such as employers) can understand
• a description including the criteria needed to earn each Open Badge
• a specific grade centre column to link to each badge (badges will be triggered when grade is equal to or greater than 1 in my case)
• an image for your Open Badge

You can choose one of the existing images in Blackboard or using any technology you can upload your own design for your Open Badge, and make sure to publish the badge to Mozilla so that it can be included in the Mozilla Backpack which aggregates badges earnt from organisations around the world. From my experience, it’s important to have attractive-looking badges or students won’t want to earn them if they don’t look nice.

Don’t Forget the Marketing and Support
It is important to get the marketing right for your Open Badges so you promote them to students by selling the benefits to them, explain what your badges are, and clarify how students can earn them. I developed handouts that I made available at various events I ran, and I also included the handouts in our VLE for Reps so they were all aware of the opportunity to earn Open Badges.

Some students I work with have never written a blog post before and were nervous about that, so I worked with colleagues to develop some optional training sessions. We offered Blogging for Reps with tips about how to write effective online content, engage audiences, and be clear about what you want to say. We also offered a peer support session where Reps would have a go at writing a blog post and give feedback to peers on their drafts. This proved really helpful.

Clarify What Success Means for Your Open Badges
In your scheme, does success mean the quantity of badges students earn or the quality of their engagement? As you will see in the infographic, our Open Badges have had strong impact in the quantitative sense with over 1,300 Reps earning at least one badge (for the online training). However, we were just as interested in the quality of engagement of our Reps, and as you will have seen in the Benefits section above the Open Badges helped Reps reflect on their experiences and helped us learn about their work across the University. We learnt about how they developed communications, change management, and leadership skills as well as much more! See my case study in the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership, and Change for a fuller look at what this qualitative impact meant for us.

Need More Support than I Can Offer?
I hope by sharing my experiences and tips this has helped you to think through how to create your own Open Badges. You can find lots of great resources to help you create them at http://openbadges.org/http://openbadges.org/ and http://www.digitalme.co.uk/.

The Work and Benefits of Student Engagement

It’s been nearly five months and the big day has nearly arrived – in this time, I have not only been researching student engagement as a PhD student and working full time, but I have also been working with three other PhD colleagues (Carla, Krystallia, and Rebekah) to apply for funding and plan an innovative storytelling workshop for our colleagues. As I’m pretty busy with my job and PhD (some say I'm crazy!), I was at first apprehensive about taking on the extra commitment of helping in this endeavor. However, I felt I should practice what I preach and do a bit more engaging in my student role to contribute to the PhD community at Moray House Graduate School of Education and Sport.

Carla, Krystallia, Rebekkah, and I have written four funding proposals, three of which came together from the EUSA Schools’ Fund, EUSA Global, and the Graduate School to generously fund our endeavor. Throughout this time, it has been a great opportunity for me as a part-time PhD student to get to know these colleagues better and work collaboratively with them which has been beneficial when PhD work can be so solitary. It has helped us develop our resilience and perseverance to write the funding requests, liaise with funders, the storyteller, caterers, etc. When we launched the event, it was fantastic to see all the spaces fill up within 24 hours showing great demand even in the midst of summer holidays. It is now with great anticipation and satisfaction that we’re looking forward to seeing our event come together tomorrow as ‘Telling the Story of Your Research: A 1.5-Day Storytelling Workshop for Academics’. You can follow our journey at #MHresearchstories on Twitter to see how we get on.

We’re hoping to see many benefits of the workshop tomorrow, seeing our PhD community come together whilst learning about each other’s research. We will also learn to communicate more effectively, reflect more on our research journey, construct new knowledge, and capture the complexity of our research in an audience-friendly manner (not bore them!). Personally I’m hoping this workshop will help me to improve my presentation skills in telling the story of my research to engage various audiences, and I look forward to hearing feedback from my peers whilst enjoying the event.

I hope we will see more such student-organised events in our community soon!

QAA National Enhancement Themes Conference

Yesterday I attended and presented at the QualityAssurance Agency (QAA) Scotland’s national Enhancement Themes conference focusing on student transitions into, through, and out of university. It was helpful that the first keynote speaker, Professor Trevor Gale, challenged this notion of student transitions by clarifying and widening out his definition of transitions. In his talk ‘Resourcing the capacity to navigate change: a typology of student transitions’, Prof Gale highlighted how transitions can be experienced vertically and horizontally, over time and across different spaces, by both students, staff, and institutions. He described T1 as a transition of induction, with an implied linear progression of students as they are inducted into higher education through a pedagogy of regulation. Next, he described T2 as a transition of development, with distinct stages of student maturation along trajectories of transformation as they develop new identities as students, researchers, and professionals. Finally, Prof Gale describes T3 as a transition of becoming, with a perpetual series of fragmented movements zigzags that recognise the messiness of life and subjective experiences through higher education. I was particularly struck by Prof Gale’s emphasis on how not only students need to transition, but also institutions need to transition to foster T3 with more flexible modules, systems of choice, and ways to adapt to accommodate diverse student needs. This flexibility and transition of institutions embraces diversity, with significant benefits for all. Therefore, it was wonderful to see Prof Gale’s critique of traditional universities and I personally saw the need for institutions to transition as a call for student-staff partnerships and projects such as co-creation of the curriculum which allow students and staff to work together to rethink the student experience of higher education which can have a significant impact on developing social justice within institutions.

At the conference sessions, I enjoyed sharing the work of my team, meeting others from different institutions in Scotland, and hearing about some new initiatives. It was a fantastic time to celebrate my student staff and their great work in our Academic Representation team at EUSA this year to make a significant impact in terms of implementing Class Rep online training and open badges, and it was fantastic to have them lead our workshop which stimulated interesting discussions about how technology can be used effectively at other institutions to support the transitions of students in different areas.

See the PowerPoint slides for our presentation Using technology to support Class Representatives transition into, through, and out of their role.

 The conference was also helpful for thinking critically about the flipped classroom and what models of this are most effective, engaging, and producing highest learning gain. It was also fantastic to learn about student-led projects such as a student professional development society and working group which helped students develop leadership, networking, analytical skills. I also enjoyed learning about the Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University interdisciplinary and collaborative CityLabs co-creation of the curriculum project, and the University of Glasgow Let’s Talk about X interdisciplinary conference which gave me lots of ideas for a Student Rep Conference I’m hoping to run next year. All in all, it was a good day and an interesting conference!

Inclusive Course Design

I am slightly distressed as to why inclusive design of course curricula is such a novel concept in the UK. In many universities in the US and Australia, it's natural when designing a new course to bring many individuals besides academics to the table to include them in the discussion. This includes librarians, IT specialists, curriculum development specialists, career advisers, and (importantly!) students. This is such a logical, straight-forward idea! Why, then, is it so novel and why are academics in the UK often left on their own to design new courses and even entire programmes without support from students and university services? Academics should not be operating in a  vacuum, with the assumption that their research expertise can magically be transferred  into strong teaching pedagogy that engages students.

Traditionally there has been very little training for academics on curriculum design and educational pedagogy (as seen in work by Barnett and Coate), and assessment has too often been designed to asses knowledge rather than been used as a tool to promote learning in new ways. How has this come to happen, especially when primary and secondary school teachers must engage in rigorous training? Why do British universities tend to rely on specialists primarily when dealing with courses after they are set up, or with problems as they arise? 

The intuitive answer is to involve specialists from the start to provide different important perspectives to course design so that higher education curricula can improve students' dispositions of knowing, acting, and being (Barnett) at university and beyond. It is exciting that in Scotland this discussion is starting to emerge, and I am really looking forward to taking part in an inclusive design pilot this year.