 y celf-igwaith 들ghwyl iawn ar hyn mae'n eu egweithio lleoliaeth modify yn unioniaeth ymddangos. A'i gael y cyfrifio ar gweithgon ac mae'n gweithgen swyddog o'r hyn y gallwn ein gwerthangodaeth ac mae'n gael gêmeth mor hwnnw fyddwn ni, mae'n gweithio i wybod hynny o'r ysgol am ychydig, Lela? Ie, yn ymgyrchiamen nhw, wrth gwrs. Ie ddod rhoi, ac fel ei fod yn fawr mwyter o gydag yma. Ie dweud, ma' yw Lela i, and the Student Engagement Partnership Manager at TCEP. So, let me tell you a bit about TCEP first. So we were set up to support project funding from the Quality Assurance Agency. And our work is directed by a sector-wise steering group that brings together our funders and partners from other agencies in the HE sector, as well as some practitioners. So, in one way, we act as a strategic partnership across the HE sector looking at and bringing together an amplifying work on student engagement. But we're also an NUS hosted staff unit that is doing projects, research and practitioner development. So, why am I here talking to you today? Well, I think technology is really an area that is ripe for partnership with students for lots of reasons. Students' learning is no longer under the sole control of institutions. And students' practices with technology is varied, challenging and innovative. And students' digital know-how needs to be used, therefore, as a resource by institutions. And the best way to do that is to work in partnership with them. But fundamentally, I think your roles, the reason that you're here, you're all in the business of improving teaching and learning. And I think that's what student engagement can do, working in partnership with students can do. So, I'm going to spend the time that I've got with you this morning talking about some of the dimensions of student engagement and this concept of students' partners. I'm going to look at some of the challenges and opportunities that I think student partnership presents. And I'd like to hear your perspectives and the activities that you are undertaking or thinking about undertaking in your local context as well. And answer any questions that you might have. So, before we begin, can I just see a show of hands? Does anybody think that they have a shared understanding of the term student engagement at your institution? If you think yes, then put your hand up. No. Maybe. Don't know. Who thinks definitely not? Absolutely. No. OK, well, some people didn't put their hand up at all, so I'm not sure what that means. But I don't think it's surprising and I ask because even though there isn't a universal understanding of the meaning of student engagement, the term student engagement, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be trying to seek to define it at a local level. Without definitions, student unions and institutional leaders, but also staff and students, will probably struggle to create some kind of shared framework for action. And the way that we define student engagement is going to affect how we seek to improve it. Talking about what we mean by student engagement, I think is also a way to demystify the concept and some of the complicated language that has almost certainly built up around it, both at a local and a national level. So student engagement can feel simultaneously really exciting, but also quite difficult. And that's probably because it's deeply political. It's values driven, it's a contested space. There's no right answer and there are different levels of power and people exerting that power and influence. So power relationships, different values, frameworks and contexts are all in play when we're trying to define what student engagement might mean to us. So there are various definitions of student engagement that you could make yourselves aware of, things like chapter B5 of the Quality Code, what's measured in, student surveys. There's various working definitions that have been developed by researchers and I can't talk about all of them today, but I do want to spend some time talking about the distinction between student engagement in learning and students actively shaping their academic community. So in the UK there's lots of work carried out on student engagement in learning, but there's also a focus on embedding student voice and institutional processes, structures and decision-making processes. So it's obviously going to come as no surprise that students who are stimulated by and invested in their learning will learn better and researchers are showing that there's strong correlations between engagement in the sense of students taking an active role in their own learning and favourable outcomes in areas such as performance, persistence and satisfaction. So that means that students who are more strongly engaged with their courses are going to get better marks, they're going to try harder and they're going to say that they're more satisfied with the course and their experience. And all of this is excellent evidence that institutions, universities, colleges are taking on board to try to improve teaching and learning on a daily basis. But I think what is less clear is whether there is an evidence base associated with the ideas of students actively shaping their academic community. That isn't to say that it doesn't have value, but assertions I think by individuals and national organisations like NUS that student voice is a good thing is often something that we take on trust rather than necessarily seeking to evidence it in some way. And I think it can be argued that an institution that invests in supporting students to be influential in decision-making are sending positive message about the other aspect of student engagement about investing in your learning as an individual. But the types of values that underpin this prevalent perception that student influence is a good thing are usually actually associated with things like rear-dressing power imbalances or accountability or democratic participation. And therefore it follows that the ends of this form of engagement aren't necessarily or precisely learning outcomes, but what we might call civic outcomes like democratic participation and accountability. And as it happens, the type of outcomes that are much harder to measure in some way. So part of defining a student engagement or partnership, what it means to you at a local level should be about articulating some of the values that are associated with student influence, why we think it matters, what less tangible outcomes that we think it might deliver. And in that process, the setting of these mutual outcomes can engender, I think, a greater responsibility and ownership from the students and staff involved, which then itself drives the culture of partnership and effective working that fosters this positive academic community. And not only, as I say, does this help us to take action and continually improve what we're doing in relation to student engagement. It helps to address the idea that students can and should only be powerful because they pay for their education. So although the practices around student engagement might be long-standing, so the existence of student unions caused representative systems, surveys, that kind of thing, student engagement as a policy priority is actually relatively recent. And we're now moving beyond the idea of a narrow focus on the validity of particular systems, the validity of a student union or a quarter-up system, and instead describing some of the concepts that are linked to students' identities and their ability to influence their environment. And that's where concepts like students and partners have gained significant currency. So just like student engagement, there's not a one-size-fits-all approach to partnership, but we can probably agree that right at its heart it's about students and staff working together to improve education. It's about investing students with the power to co-create not just knowledge, but the institution itself. And it's increasingly evident that partnerships shouldn't just be seen as a set of discrete engagement mechanisms or exercises, but rather a way of framing the culture that exists within a community in a higher education provider. It's something that's more than the sum of its parts. It's not a tick-box exercise, but rather it should be the motivation for a set of processes that might come about. And to quote from the Higher Education Academy, which is the quote up here and there, fantastic publication, Engagement Through Partnership, Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. They say, partnership is essentially a process of engagement, not a product. It's a way of doing things rather than an outcome in itself. All partnership is student engagement, but not all student engagement is partnership. So at every stage of the enhancement cycle within institutions from collecting and analysing evidence base to designing new interventions to improve things that you've identified to evaluating those interventions, there will be opportunities for students and staff to work in partnership with students being supported and enabled to be agents of positive change within that process. But in order for that to be fully realised, I think there will almost certainly need to be a strong partnership approach at a senior level between the provider and ideally a student's union or a similar representative body. And this is a mutual accountability for both the way that enhancement initiatives are conceived of and implemented and the outcomes they deliver. And this will require institutions and student unions to help staff and students to orient their practice towards some kind of shared ideas of success. So return there to what I said about definitions and why that's important. We're actually trying to orient the diverse mix of students and staff in our institutions towards some kind of shared understanding of what success might look like. So an effective partnership approach between institutions and student unions should allow for enhancement to be based on things like management information or democratic priorities that have arisen. But the activity to then be developed at a local level between students and staff who understand their context and their disciplines. So I think an example of this is student-led teaching awards and an example of if wise student engagement is to specifically lead to enhancement that it has to be really well thought through on the outcomes properly evaluated with students and staff. So three mechanisms like student-led teaching awards, student-teachers and institutions are supporting students to recognise and reward excellent teaching. And some of the nominations in local student-teachers and institutions involve recognising innovative use of technology, for example, as one of the categories. And the skills and mindset of exchanging constructive feedback in support of reflection and improvement can have a value both to student and teacher. And some institutions and student-teachers are finding ways for these schemes to really meaningfully input into concepts or approaches to teaching excellence at their institution. However, NUS did an evaluation of a project that H.E.A. funded NUS to do on student-led teaching awards between 2011 and 2014. And they found that student-teachers were able to articulate a really strong sense of value in recognising rewarding excellent teaching. But they struggled to identify any specific outcomes or enhancements that had been made as a result of undertaking student-led teaching awards using the data. So SLTA schemes face similar challenges to other types of teaching recognition schemes and awards in determining whether their purpose is recognition of teaching excellence or if it can foster wider enhancement of teaching and learning. And there's a risk that if institutions and student-teachers focus on data quality rather than use, then this will lead only to interesting insight about student views on teaching and not use of that insight for the purposes of teaching enhancement. So in this case, if the intention is enhancement, if the intention is making positive change, then we need a more in-depth understanding of the kinds of conversations between academics and students that SLTA data could foster in particular and the types of interventions for change in institutions that this data could therefore inform. So in that example, there are two things that I've mentioned that I just want to touch on a bit further. And the first of them is student unions. And I think an important dimension of the student experience of student engagement is allowing students to organise around issues that they care about and develop independent judgments and priorities about what they want to affect change on and how they want to tackle issues. And a holistic view of the student experience I think recognises the role of student unions in affording students opportunities for co-inextracurricular activities, independent academic advice as well as personal leadership and development. And students I think provides often a very clear sense of what is in the student interest but this very clearly takes leadership and the ability to assess where student interest lies and to argue for it and to listen to a very broad constituency to ensure that their concerns are understood and that they're being advocated for and informing change. But therefore I think the concerns about the capacity of some student unions to effectively represent a full diversity of students are legitimate but they should ideally be seen as a starting point for constructive conversations and engagement in which the principles of collectivism and solidarity and representation are being upheld in what we're striving for with student engagement. The second issue that I wanted to return to briefing is the idea of teaching excellence in the context of a changing landscape in higher education and the last question that we had was about the teaching excellence framework and this is a policy issue that's going to have huge implications I think but also for lots of things but one of them being student engagement the impact on student engagement practices and the perceived value of student voice at a local and national level and the sectors currently trying to answer questions like what does teaching excellence look like what are the core aims of a TEF how do you measure and assess teaching excellence within the context of a TEF and I think for a teaching excellence framework to be effective the judgments that it makes has to be credible and it has to be based on the views of students, academic staff and education experts but I think we should bear in mind as well that teaching excellence is a narrow frame and we shouldn't be losing sight of what we mean by excellent learning and excellent learning includes teaching, independent study, assessment, engagement and a physical, virtual, intellectual environment that can stimulate all of those things and I think the national plot thickens even further when we think about quality so teaching excellence in relation to the quality assessment review and amongst the debates taking place are whether these new arrangements can deliver student engagement as a key principle for quality assessment and I think there's also lots of impacts that social and political developments are having on students' behaviours and attitudes and therefore implications for their engagement at a local level which will influence your practice in relation to it so in very broad generalities then students have lots of competing demands on their time they are consciously fee paying with associated implications for their behaviours and their attitudes they are diverse in background and expectations and aspirations they are hyper connected within a world of technology that is often out of step with traditional forms of learning but also with engagement and they are distrustful of conventional political authority so as a result there are some things that we need and when I say we I mean you as practitioners and we working on this at our national level we need a better understanding of how digital technology can support student engagement we need a better shared understanding of the effectiveness of student engagement practice and the impact that it has on curriculum, quality, recruitment, retention, satisfaction and so on we need a better understanding of the development of subject and disciplinary led innovations in relation to student engagement and we need an analysis of how and in what context students exercise agency how they do that and what value it is adding to them outside of their traditional learning journey so before I hand it over to you for some discussion and questions I just wanted to come back to this concept of partnership and as I've said it would probably be really strange if everyone had the same view of what partnership should be given that it involves innovative approaches to handing students power then there's also potentially a reason why institutions and student unions wouldn't necessarily want to try to lock it down in some way but in order to make sure that it is authentic it's probably as worth as practitioners having some tests to see whether what we're saying we want partnership to be is actually what's happening and these I think are just some of the questions that we could go about asking ourselves when we are trying to work in partnership with students so has students been part of creating an agenda or goals not just bought in once the debates already happened to give some kind of nod or a has thought been given to which cohorts of students are more likely to engage have we thought about the diversity of our student body is something going to change as a result of this partnership work is something going to be different if students pulled out of the work would it carry on regardless seamlessly as if they were never there do students feel like the ideas that they have or listen to are they listened to constructively are they challenged as a result and are they taken seriously and do the decisions that are taken feel one sided or mutual so these are just a few of the things I think that could be helping to inform your practice at a local level so two that I just want to highlight in particular don't just ask students what they want because you'll probably just get a unimaginative shopping list of things ask them what they care about and what they want to see change and provide them with frameworks for thinking through issues for organising their ideas and coming up with innovations and the second one is that yesterday JISC, NUS and TSEP launched a benchmarking tool on the digital student experience and the tools based on findings about what students want their digital experiences to be and how they want to improve them most of the outstanding practice in the tool references students as partners and drives you towards working in partnership as the most effective way to achieve outstanding practice it's a tool for starting conversations but it can be used in lots of different ways and there's a great introduction to the tool that outlines how you can do that my colleagues there tonight from JISC is in the room so we're both very happy to talk to you about this tool but also some other fantastic resources that are online for you to look at and to access so I'm very happy to hand over now to any questions that you might have but I also had some questions for you and I think we've got a little bit of time if you maybe want to turn to the person next to you we'll go and find somebody if you're at the back of the room and talk very briefly about some of these questions and then I'd like to both answer questions you might have but really hear from you about what you're doing locally what support you need some of the excellent practice that you've been looking at okay so if we spend we've got a few minutes a few minutes talking to each other and then to me thank you any questions? I've got a question I've well I was completely on board with this I think students absolutely need to be part of the narrative and we've attempted quite a lot of this stuff I'm at Liverpool Hope University do you have any advice on incentivising these processes to get bodies through the door we get the small subsets of the population don't generally represent the whole do you have any advice on incentivising this so students can have the foresight to be able to get involved with this because often these initiatives live beyond their student experience and sometimes the immediate incentive isn't there for them in the context of student representatives we talk about motivation quite a lot because often the marketing material that student unions and institutions produce is geared towards employability or something that's put in your CV but actually when student unions do surveys or talk to student representatives about why they became a rep and what they wanted to change it's about more altruistic reasons so they wanted to make a difference or they'd had a really bad experience on one aspect of their course and they wanted to make sure it didn't they wanted to influence it so I think having a basket of motivations or reasons why students might get involved and pitching your marketing materials to reach to touch on all of those things is quite important rather than directing it towards one particular thing food always helps if you've got the budget food and drink I think also some of the challenges are often when you're trying to get students to come to you and quite often you need to go to them so that might be about talking to your student union about different academic societies for example that exist so these are students that are already organising in pursuit of extending their learning or making enhancements to their course and they're often inviting alumni and staff in to talk to them about the subject and about the institution so that for example could be a space that you could go into to ask them what they're thinking it might already be that there's other existing opportunities for representatives for example to come together with each other that again you could go into so I think exploring ways that you can come to them rather than necessarily asking them to come to you I think also the way that you once they're in the room as I was saying the way that you draw out experiences of students is quite important so rather than just asking a long list of questions giving people a framework for thinking this through using some engaging teaching practices in the way that you would do in a classroom for how you're trying to elicit views from students Brilliant thank you that was really useful Oh Alicia Robinson from Gloucestershire College sorry I was just jumping on what this guy asked because we're actually doing a project at our college student innovators and this year to get them on board we got involved with them at enrolment stage so as they were going through the college they kept getting held up at certain points and so we had people walking around talking to them about the opportunities that were available there so we got everyone from every subject just whenever they were stopped and had nothing else to do so we got a lot of engagement there No I mean really just to emphasise the tools that I put up earlier have a look at t-sets website just website and if you do have any questions or you're doing something really exciting and we could tell other people about it and please do get in touch and thank you very much Thank you very much Ellie lots of food for thought particularly for those of us who are working with students right we just got a few seconds for the