Student Partnership

One of the most transformative pieces of work I have undertaken in recent years, in terms of my own personal development, was a student partnership project I led in the summer of 2018 called 'The student experience of LearnPlus'.

I attained funding for a Cardiff University Student Education Innovation Project (CUSEIP). These projects enable students to work on learning and teaching enhancement projects and provide a bursary to underwrite summer placement opportunities for students within Schools and other departments.

I decided to undertake an evaluation of the student experience of lecture capture in the School of Social Sciences. The Panopto system (called 'LearnPlus' in Cardiff) had been available for around three years, but had been rolled out across the school (to varying degrees) in the academic year 2017/18. It had been, and remained, a contentious issue in the School, and with a University 'opt-out' policy on the horizon the debate was continuing. I saw this project as an opportunity to surface the student voice and ensure student perspectives, experiences and requirements were considered as part of school and individual decisions around lecture capture.

I managed the whole project, including:

    • Writing the project brief and application for project funding.
    • Recruiting and supervising the student (over eight weeks).
    • Coordinating the overall project direction, including data collection, priority areas and analysis and dissemination.
    • Presenting interim results at an all school learning and teaching development day.
    • Co-writing the final project report.
    • Implementing some recommendations / suggestions from the project, including two student facing resources, a 'Using LearnPlus' guide, and a 'LearnPlus in SOCSI' guide, the second of which the most important in terms of communicating with students and managing expectations.

This was my first such project and it gave me practical experience of budgeting, reporting, and processes around recruiting students, while also exposing me to more academic methods of data collection, analysis and presentation than I had experienced previously. More than this though the project tested my judgement, decision making and communication, as lecture capture in the school was very much a hot topic. I had to be careful how I positioned and promoted the project while also fitting in with another review of LearnPlus (largely focused on the experience of staff) that was being undertaken by an academic colleague at the same time.

The biggest learning point of this project for me though was the power of student partnership. At the simplest level, working alongside a student on student experience improves our capacity, allows us to tap into student perspectives when designing and implementing the project, and enhances and improves how students engage with our project (especially in interviews, for example, where students are more forthcoming when talking to a fellow student). I was also surprised at how illuminating and useful it was just to share an office with a student, giving first hand insight into student life and also giving myself and colleagues a sounding board for ideas and suggestions. It caused me to reflect on how we can easily lose touch with what the student experience entails, and how important it is for us to have regular (informal) contact with students, something that is sometimes more difficult for us as learning technologists than for our academic colleagues.

More fundamentally, this project prompted me to reflect on the value and nature of student partnership generally and triggered an interest in this area, one that I had previously only had a passing knowledge of. I started reading more about student partnership, and related concepts such as engagement, co-creation, co-design and 'students as change agents'. I realised that there are many different types of partnership activity taking place on different levels and scales, and in a range of contexts, from institution or department wide strategies and initiatives, to more local course, module, or even lesson or assessment initiatives.

I found the work of Bovill et al (2016) around partnership 'roles' particularly interesting and reflected that, during our CUSEIP project, the partnership was at 'school' level, while the student took on the 'co-researcher' role (students collaborate meaningfully on educational research or subject-based research). Another reflection prompted by my reading was whether our project was a true partnership in the sense of an equal ownership between staff and students, as I felt that I provided most of the direction and coordination of the project. In part this was necessary due to the complexity and high-profile of the project - I felt some parameters and guidance were needed. In a future partnership project though I may try and shift this power dynamic, so that the student can be a 'consultant' or a 'pedagogical co-designer' in the model of Bovill et al. To do this I would:

    • Ensure the objective of project was suitable, and allowed the student enough freedom, creativity and ownership.
    • Take into account, during the recruitment process, applicants' level of engagement and interest in the topic at hand (something that, perhaps surprisingly, we didn't prioritise for the CUSEIP project).
    • Avoid prescribing plans or courses of action, or premeditating any of the work (this was somewhat unavoidable in the CUSEIP project as timescales meant we needed to release a survey before the student started.)

Having inspired a deal of reflection and personal development, I was keen to record and share the lessons from this project and, along with a colleague who had implemented a similar project a year earlier at University level, authored a paper entitled 'Using student partnership to explore student experiences of lecture capture'. At the time of writing this has been submitted to the ALT journal 'Research in Learning Technology' and is awaiting a response. The writing was a transformative experience in itself, as it was the first academic paper I had written for many years, and I learned a lot about this process, much of it from my more experienced colleague.

It also solidified my interest in the area of student partnership, confirming the depth and complexity of the area, and inspired me to commence another CEI funded project in 2019 entitled 'co-design of e-learning resources'.

Reference

Bovill, C., et al., (2016) ‘Addressing Potential Challenges in Co-Creating Learning and Teaching: Overcoming Resistance, Navigating Institutional Norms and Ensuring Inclusivity in Student–Staff Partnerships’, Higher Education, vol. 71, no. 2, pp.195–208. doi: 10.1007/s10734-015-9896-4