The Design of Student Training Resources to Enhance the Student Voice in Academic Quality Assurance and Quality Enhancement Processes

Without appropriate training and recognition, students – in particular Class Representatives – often struggle to engage fully with a University’s quality assurance and quality enhancement processes. Through the “Our Student Voice” project in Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin), a suite of digital training resources were designed to provide training for students to help develop the requisite knowledge and skills for effective participation there processes, thus strengthening student engagement and enhancing the student voice. The resources are organised into thirteen accessible episodes that each commence with an animated scenario that sets out key messages. The remainder of the episode provides detailed guidance for students and learning activities to help students develop their skillset. Upon completion of the learning activities, and having satisfactorily undertaken one of three specific student role in the quality processes, students can apply for recognition through a digital badge. The training resources and digital badges have been co-designed by a project team comprised of staff and students from across the University guided by best practice internationally. This paper describes the co-design process and presents a set of lessons learned that may assist other higher education institutions in enabling impactful student engagement in their academic quality assurance and quality enhancement processes

Key Skills Framework: Enhancing Employability Within a Lifelong Learning Paradigm

Employability has become an area of interest among the general public and policy makers alike, with an increasing number of reports in the general media regarding the need for workers in certain sectors to up-skill due to the possible threat of job ‘displacement’. In addition, there has been an increase in education and training policy documents emphasising that citizens should pursue Lifelong Learning /Life Wide Learning to address the increased job-related uncertainty attributed to the globalisation process and the concomitant competitive threats. Academics such as Barnett (2005) claim that we are living in an era of ‘super complexity\u27 and rapid change where even trade unions are beginning to come to terms with the notion that in the present employment climate ‘change is a given rather than an exception’. Within this framework of change, of global economics, of mobility of capital and labour, and of social flux, the Irish economy has outperformed many of her fellow European Union (EU) member states in terms of both GDP and GNP (see note 4). However, the pertinent question now posed is how will Ireland maintain this competitive advantage moving forward? While the answer to this question is multi-dimensional and complex, requiring expert input from various academics, professional bodies and other interested parties, there is nonetheless a growing acceptance that education and training are fundamental to the development of a sustainable solution. This working paper presents a conceptual framework and signposts a research process presently being utilised by a research team to explore employability and a social construct. As such, the reader is presented with emergent work and invited to contribute to this early stage of the research process

Constructing a Practice Informed Graduate Attributes Toolkit: built in not bolt-on

It is generally recognised that Higher Education students should be afforded a range of formal and informal learning opportunities to develop skills, or graduate attributes, that have the potential to enhance their success both in their chosen career choice and as active global citizens. This requires a shared understanding of these graduate attributes among programme team members, students and external stakeholders. The DIT Graduate Attributes policy (2012) therefore requires that all programmes make explicit an agreed set of graduate attributes intended to be fully integrated within curriculum design, with their development clearly mapped across programmes. To facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience across the Institute, initiatives such as the Graduate Attributes Toolkit are being developed. The online toolkit draws on a database of case studies collected from lecturers across a broad range of disciplines. Users of the Graduate Attributes Toolkit are invited to select one of five overarching attributes – enterprising, engaged, enquiry-based, expert and effective; and then explore each of these further through associated, detailed attributes such as excellent communicator and digitally literate. Toolkit users are provided with a description and rationale for each of the 20 detailed graduate attributes, and then a tool to help them recognise the degree to which their practice currently supports students in developing this attribute. They are then provided with access to case studies which demonstrate how the objective of developing this attribute can further inform the development of their practice. The case studies are accompanied by lists of suggested learning outcomes which can help the lecturer both recognise how their current activity contributes to the development of key graduate attributes, and can also encourage them to further develop their modules to reflect those attributes. The DIT Graduate Attribute Toolkit is a growing resource which is available at http://dit.ie/teaching/graduateattributes

The July 31, 2007 Stellar Occultation by Pluto

International audienc

The July 31, 2007 Stellar Occultation by Pluto

International audienc