Jisc Change Agents' Network Conference 2024

Managing student engagement has always been challenging (Lowe, 2020), and these challenges have been further exacerbated by the global pandemic (Attree, 2021; Kelly & Kanu, 2021; McKay et. al., 2021). As a result of this, the importance of staff engaging with training and development that gives them the latest evidence, insight and solutions to create the right environment for academic and social student success is vital.

All HEIs offer varying forms of staff development that look to address these challenges from workshops to asynchronous resources. However, many are created for staff by staff and lack the student input and co-creation required to lead to successful student outcomes. This lighting talk will draw on my experience as an early career educational developer responsible for designing and delivering student engagement-related staff development for colleagues at Nottingham Trent University. The talk will take attendees on a whistle-stop journey through my experience co-creating this staff development offer with students including: 

• Co-creation with a student intern to co-design, deliver and evaluate workshops on community building and transition and its success with staff engagement, attendance and outcomes. 

• Using storyboarding with students to establish a timeline of student’s high and low points that informed staff development and brought to life the barriers many students face and how staff can support student success in overcoming these. 

• The results of working with three second-year psychology students on a short educational co-creation research project “Why students are not motivated to engage with flipped learning and pre-work”. This culminated in the creation of gamified H5P* (HTML5 Package) content to make learning more engaging that staff could use, adapt and deploy with their students.