Student engagement – what's it all about?

Benefits and opportunities of student engagement

June 2009 (length 4:55)

The following is a transcript of a film which can be viewed on this web page:
www.qaa.ac.uk/students/studentEngagement/films09.asp

Alex Bols, National Union of Students
There are massive benefits of engaging students. They are the key people in terms of knowing how they've experienced their course, how they've experienced life within their institution, and so actually getting their feedback and involving them in the process of improving the quality is absolutely essential and we have seen many benefits.

Louise Goldring, Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning, University of Manchester
The things that we've found with students being involved in the processes is that, actually, within some of the courses the student feedback has actually improved because our student interns are involved in designing various exercises or designing resources for students, and they're more aware of what's relevant for other students; they know how to make it exciting and engaging for them.

Nik Heerens, sparqs
When we started our work in Scotland on improving student engagement, we first started training students so our focus was mainly on how we can improve the awareness that students have about the role that they have as a representative; they still weren't as effective as possible when we didn't have the buy-in of staff. The way in which we tried to overcome that obstacle was by developing staff workshops, so we don't only train students on how they become more effective, but also we try to train academic staff on finding ways in which they can fully engage students.

Kath Hodgson, University of Leeds
Well, we have engaged students in quality assurance through ensuring that they are involved in quality enhancement projects and initiatives; through reinvigorating representatives at different levels in the institution on committees, and making sure that the committees are valuable for the students, and they're not just attending for our sake and just so that we can tick the box again that assures us that we have students present. We actually want to make it a meaningful exercise for the students as well as for the institution.

Mark Wainman, Sheffield Hallam University
Some of the examples of how my institution has engaged students in quality assurance is involvement of students in our internal academic review process. We have students sitting as full members of the review panel and they contribute to the judgement that that panel makes about the quality and standards that are in that subject area.

Julie Hall, Roehampton University
Student panels - working with programme teams at the end of the year when every programme has an away day. We've been encouraging staff to invite a student panel along. These student panels will supplement the information that they've got in the past from their programme reps. This is much more in-depth, a richer picture of the student experience and the student panels have been really helpful. We've also used the panels at an Institutional level at the annual Learning and Teaching Conference; we had a fantastic panel of students talking about their experiences of assessment, for example.

Kim Macintyre, University of the West of Scotland
We introduced the payment of these students at the same rate of pay we pay the external panel members to get them fully involved that way.

Louise Goldring
I think the best examples that I can give you have to do with when an intern has worked on a longer term development project at the University, for instance there was a module this year where it looked like the module wasn't going to run again, and then after the student had worked with the member of staff for the year and gathered feedback along the way, made changes to the course, it was agreed that the course would be able to run again because the student feedback had gone up so much.

Julie Hall
An example of an outcome of the student engagement in quality assurance has been that we've now got our Students' Union developing a new approach to programme reps; so this has led on to the Students' Union really owning that kind of area of work now and from next year we've got a new policy set up, new training developed, lots of new plans for really enhancing the programme rep scheme and that's totally come from the students getting involved.

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