Jisc Change Agents' Network Conference 2024

This presentation will explore students’ perspectives of the employability benefits of taking part in a student-staff partnership research project carried out at the University of Oxford. With a focus on investigating students’ digital skill development and technological needs, the student-staff partnership project brought students and staff together to develop an investigative approach, collect and analyse data, and develop outputs to convey their findings. Through both their involvement as partners in each of these steps of the research project, the students found they developed: 

• their interpersonal and professional communication skills 

• their teamworking and collaboration skills, both in-person and online 

• their project management skills 

• their qualitative research skills, such as designing questions with data in mind, conducting interviews and analysing qualitative data 

• their ability to cater a task to varying stakeholder opinions and needs 

• their understanding of higher education and its complex digital landscape 

• a better sense of the importance of getting involved in educational developments 

The talk will focus on enabling student partners from the project to speak to what lead to these employability benefits and how this has shown up in their careers less than a year later. This will likely involve summarising the background to the project, detailing the student-staff partnership approach that we negotiated, and then prompting the past student partners with questions to reflect on how working in partnership on this project contributed to their employability and current career paths.  

This presentation will largely reflect a co-authored paper that is currently set to be published in the Journal of Educational Innovation Partnership and Change in April 2024.