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Students as Co-creators
At the University of Exeter, we place the student at the centre of what we do. We don’t think of education as something to be transmitted and received but something to be mutually and collaboratively achieved. The educational experience of our students provides opportunities for personal growth, but also allows for evolution of teaching methodologies.
Explore case studies“The Digital Learning Developers have demonstrated their importance not just as a critical day-to-day resource, but as strategically important colleagues in imagining, developing and delivering change in the ways we conceive of learning and assessment.”
By nurturing our learner’s sense of ownership over their own educational pathway, we empower them to become an integral part of co-creating the curriculum and their future. This ideology became a reality when we were faced with the outbreak of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns, which made in-person learning an impossibility. Our transition to online learning was made possible thanks to the implementation of Project Enhance. By recruiting our students and recent graduates as digital learning assistants and developers we were able to collaborate on the design and delivery of course material, providing essential student communication of advice, guidance and feedback to the teaching staff. Not only that, they have also played an integral role in the development of virtual field trips. The pandemic meant that students were deprived of the opportunity to become immersed in the environments they were learning about and the rapid development and deployment of virtual field trips became a vital part of the academic portfolio. Our students have played a crucial role in delivering these in a short time frame – helping to create engaging and informative additions to the curriculum.
Beyond the classroom, we also empower our students to shape their own future. We believe in harnessing their entrepreneurial spirit and encouraging our students to nurture their ideas and facilitate their development into start-up businesses. The Student Startups Exeter programme gives students the support they need and a platform to propel potential business ventures to fruition.
As the pandemic began to recede, May 2021 saw the inaugural Festival of Discovery, an event designed to bring the student community back to campus with an array of events introducing them to the Student Union and life around the University campus. The Festival of Discovery would not have been possible without close collaboration between the University and its student bodies, and the hard work of everyone involved.
When we work together in digital, sustainable and collaborative ways, we can align learning and transform education into a partnership, with students at its centre.
The use of students and recent graduates as essential parts of the Project Enhance Team to transition to online education delivery was never more prevalent than in the development of structured templates for our virtual learning environment.
Our Festival of Discovery is shaped around students and informed by our ethos of enabling a more interactive experience while empowering students to take control of their learning journey.
One important element of student’s studies that was not possible during the pandemic was field trips and the Project Enhance team put their minds to re-creating the experience, harnessing the student and graduate contributors skills and insight to ensure it met student expectations.
The roots of many iconic brands and companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Tesla are known to be humble, with little more than a coffee-stained idea and rudimentary prototypes produced in a spare room or garage. At the University of Exeter, we are committed to supporting our students in these formative stages and nurture their entrepreneurial spirit throughout their education via the Student Startup Team.
Project Enhance and the work of the student and graduate digital learning assistants/developers enabled the University to transition to a virtual learning environment quickly and reduce the workload on academic staff. This collaboration is continuing to refine our approach and deliver on-going benefits for our students beyond the pandemic.
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