 Hi everyone. Good morning. We're here from DQIT to present Partners Employability, which is a student staff collaboration to develop award to recognise the skills developed by active student engagement. My name is Brea McGuire. I'm the president of the Students Union. My colleagues here today are Linda Murphy, who's head of student services. Dr Muir McGuire, who is the centre of learning and teaching, and Catherine Staunton from the Careers and Employability Office. Let me give you an overview of the project. This project is a collaboration between staff and students who, right from the offset, will work together to develop a framework. This is a step on the partnership road where students will be co-creators right from the very start. We'll establish structures and process to support student engagement, highlight and develop key graduate attributes and the empowerment of students. The principle offset of this is a special purpose award, which I think is a 10 credit purpose award. We have students who are very, very active in the life of DQIT. We have a very active volunteer society. We have student ambassadors who are trained to take new students around campus. They help out at Careers Day, Open Days, events. We have science and sports students who engage with the wider community through various projects, visiting schools or having schools come in, doing showcase and exhibitions. We have students who conceive, set up and run societies, who manage societies, whether it's the treasurer, the chairperson, the secretary, who are actively involved in promoting sports clubs and societies throughout. Through the SU ourselves, we train our class reps in how to better represent their classes. That's anything from effective communication skills to presentation skills to professionalism in how to deal with peers and lecturers service providers. Through, we also have an SU crew that students who engage, promote and showcase the events in different campaigns that the Students Union run. All of these students are developing skills employers are looking for. The development leadership, problem solving, empathy, teamwork and effective communication. Our project is about empowering these students to recognise and evidence the skills and give them the recognition in a special purpose award. So the rationale for the project. So how can we support and recognise this engagement? We need structures and processes that foster engagement and partnership. So dialogue has already opened with our class reps and feedback has been currently received by them on the award about us all working together to create this project. So far they've been incredibly positive and asking an awful lot of questions. So that's kind of working in our favour that they're actively giving an awful lot of thought to what we're proposing and an awful lot of thought to the value to it and also to working together. So they're putting the mechanisms in place. So through this project, students and staff will come together and create the framework. It's putting the skills students have already learned into a real world context. It's exploring their future role as professionals, while also improving their self confidence. Students are open. Actually, indeed, students are excited about this prospect of becoming partnerships partners and working together on this. My own experience as a student officer has been as a class rep for three years. I also set up a society and I was chairperson of the mature student society and I've also worked on different working groups and steering committees. So I can kind of see the value that this project has. So I'm going to pass you on to Linda. Thank you. So I'm just going to look at what the project will deliver. And as mentioned in our overview, staff and students will work in partnership to develop a framework for recognizing and evidencing student engagement, particularly in terms of employability. And the complete project will be underpinned by significant professional development amongst all of the partners in the project. There will be three main deliverables from the project. The principal outcome of the project being a Validated Special Purpose Award, 10 credits at level 7. This will be supported by processes and procedures to develop a system for recording student engagement and also then resources and activities to support the delivery of the award. So what success will look like in the short term, we propose to have the Validated Special Purpose Award for a targeted group for the first term, a piloted group particularly for students' course representatives and then for members of our volunteer in society. The medium term then we look at extending that and having more students registered on the program. In the longer term then, students will be better equipped to engage in our institute's quality assurance processes. The project will also have the positive impact on skills which will be evidenced by students in the portfolios presented to employers. And we hope that then again that will lead to positive feedback from employers. So I'm going to hand you over to Moira now to talk us through how we plan to action the project. Thanks Linda. So how will we go about it? The initial step will be to set up the governance of the project, set up the steering group and start to identify our needs and priorities. We've already identified a need to build capacity in key areas which I'll talk about in a moment but that's very much part of the early stage of the project. So it's professional development really for all of us involved to enable us to design the program, design the supporting processes and also to design the resources that will enable us to deliver it. The next stage would be to validate the program then to launch the program, to run and evaluate the pilot. At each stage this is going to be underpinned by ongoing consultation with all our stakeholders and by ongoing promotion and awareness raising with respect to the initiative. In terms of capacity, the areas we've identified where we need to build capacity are partnership, working in partnership. The students union will lead on that strand and will implement and coordinate all that activity. We need to build capacity and curriculum design among all partners and the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching will implement and coordinate that and we need to build capacity in all our understanding of employment and employability and student services is going to take the lead on that. So that will help us to come together to have really a shared vision of where we're going with this and a framework for developing the program. The specific work packages are the actual design of the programs, the learning outcomes and so on, content assessment. The resources that will support that including Moodle page, that's our VLE workshops. The processes, very important would be the recording of student engagement activity. We have processes in some areas to do this but we need to scale it up considerably, make sure they talk to each other. There's quite a bit of work to do there and then the procedural and the program set up the administrative side of that work as well. Throughout this will be informed and guided by iterative consultation with all our stakeholders. We were asked now feedback to clarify the involvement of students and students are full partners in this project. So at the governance level the Student Union is a full partner, the Student Union President is a full partner in the project, is a key member of the steering group. In terms of development the Student Union is going to lead in the capacity building side in terms of partnership and we're going to have extensive consultation with class representatives in the development phase and that has already begun as Maria mentioned. In terms of the program design, we want this to be collaborative and that's what a lot of the capacity building is about. So students will be involved in the curriculum design. All the underpinning processes will be agreed through consultation with class representatives. One of the parts I'm most excited about is that we are planning to employ students over the summer to work with us on developing some of the learning resources to deliver the program which will be very exciting from our point of view. In terms of then the implementation the class reps and student ambassadors will be very active in the program promotion throughout and will be the Student Union will continue to be active in the management and promotion of the program and again there'll be ongoing consultation throughout. I'm just going to hand over now to Catherine just to tell you a little bit about the impact. Okay so just to summarise on the impact and I suppose how we're going to measure that impact of the project, I suppose we've identified five main areas that we see the impact focusing on. First in the area of reach, engaging with the staff, the students, the USI, every involved in engaging within that. I'm measuring that through the engagement with the consultations and the uptake of students in the actual project itself, the program launch and ongoing workshops and presentations throughout. The second area is the area of the team itself and building that capacity as my colleagues have talked about, to be able to collaborate well in a sustainable way in a framework which involves everybody and I suppose setting up a model on how to do that. Cross-institution, not siloed, but everybody's involved from student, academic and careers and employers as well and that would be an area close to me and reflecting each of us on that and sharing our learning as that develops. Then I suppose key is that the learning and the learners, the student themselves, their engagement with the process and connecting with students and understanding that they know what they know, that they can apply and articulate what they know and they can adapt to that for the workplace and getting the student feedback on the program and how relevant it has been for them and the employers and the impact that they see having a direct feedback on in terms of either placement or going on to graduate opportunities. The next area and I suppose this is really key for us in the project is the whole idea of organisational practices and systems, that this is a framework, a model that will be sustainable to ensure greater partnership in working with students as opposed to just giving it a sort of lip service to it that is actually embedded within how we do our work and that it does recognise the valid and vital contribution of students to the life of DKIT as a community, as a place of learning and as a place of engaging with employers and their feedback and their participation is going to be a way in which their involvement is going to ensure that they are involved in the quality assurance processes within curriculum development as a whole and a model to support that going forward. Nurturing and recognising active citizenship as mentioned already, that this will hopefully act as an advocate for year on year that more people and students will be involved and academics and the whole student and staff body will be actively involved in ensuring that active citizenship has a key role within the institute and that we have quality partnerships that we are able to build on the existing partnerships that are working very successfully and grow with the community voluntary and industry networks and then that final area of culture of enhancement that this is something that is embedded within how we do our work in DKIT, that that is a model of partnership that can be extended to other areas and that contributes ultimately to the partnership and I suppose how we would measure that would be the response of students and staff to the initiative and any outputs in terms of publications, workshops that we can I suppose move forward on. So I think that the focus then on sustainability, I suppose key to the institute in developing this is that there is something that has legs that can stand on its own after the initial setup. Resources are required to develop this framework to have something robust, something that can withstand the ebb and flow of these types of projects so that we have good systems in place and supporting processes but beyond this it will be managed and maintained and sustained by the staff of the institute and the students and thereafter will become integrated into how we do our work and sustained by the staff and the resourcing that exists already. So really the initial outlay is where we're going to bed down the solid foundation and then on ongoing basis it will be up to all of us involved in the partnerships to continue to build awareness and promote the program among all stakeholders involved. Okay, so thanks very much for your time.