UK Quality Code for Higher Education Advice and Guidance Student Engagement

Working collaboratively as part of a sector wide development group I contributed my expertise on principles and practices of student engagement and partnership. This involved drafting core text, reviewing drafts and providing collective feedback in the finalisation of the document. Abstract This guidance describes the meaningful participation of students in quality assurance and enhancement processes, helping improve their educational experience as well as benefiting the wider student body, provider and sector. Effective student engagement contributes to quality assurance and enhancement processes by capturing the voices of all students

Evaluating Student Partnership for Enhancement

Student engagement has been a core pillars of our Scottish Quality Enhancement Framework from its inception, ensuring a strong and meaningful student voice and contribution to our assurance and enhancements agendas, works and achievements. With a wide spread shift across the sector from engagement of students to partnership working, and the celebration of 20 years of enhancement, it feels fitting and timely to ask the question ‘How do we evaluate our ideas and practices of partnership, and their impacts enhancing the student experience?’. This presentation utilises the presenters own institutional context as a case study, and initial findings from a small-scale research project, to explore how we currently evaluate student partnerships in their many forms, and where we may need to expand our evaluative practice and approach to examine the impacts of partnership for the future

Enhancement-led Institutional Review of Abertay University : Outcome Report

Summary Outcome Report of QAA Scotland Enhancement-led Institutional Review of Abertay University

Enhancement-led Institutional Review of Abertay University : Technical Report

Technical Report of the QAA Scotland Enhancement-led Institutional Review of Abertay University. The report concludes that Abertay University has effective arrangements for managing academic standards and the student learning experience. This is a positive judgement, which means that the University meets sector expectations in securing the academic standards of its awards and enhancing the quality of the student learning experience it provides, currently and into the future. This judgement confirms there can be public confidence in the University's awards and in the quality of the learning experience it provides for its students

Risks, reflection, rewards, and resistance: academic perspectives on creative pedagogies for active learning

In recent decades there has been a paradigmatic shift in higher education towards active learning, requiring educators to adopt student-centred approaches to teaching to promote deep learning and the development of essential graduate attributes. A ‘Creative pedagogies for active learning’ course was designed to offer academic staff an opportunity to take risks in developing innovative student-centred teaching approaches. While participants encountered ‘dissonance’ during the early stages of the creative pedagogies course, the course leads were able to support participants through this period of uncertainty and risk-taking towards successfully disrupting their own teaching practice. This reflective analysis paper outlines the course and showcases several case studies of practice by participants. We also reflect on their experiences through a subsequent roundtable discussion. This revealed that the course had made a longer-term impact on some participants in terms of their teaching and assessment practice and showcasing this to other educators. However, resistance to change in some departments was noted, making it difficult for staff to implement creative pedagogies more widely in practice. Suggestions for overcoming resistance are presented, and the paper concludes with future directions for taking this work forward

“There are things I want to say but you do not ask”: a comparison between standardised and individualised evaluations in substance use treatment

There has been an increasing call for service users to be more actively involved with the evaluation of treatment outcomes. One strategy to impove such involvement is to ask service users to contribute with their own criteria for evaluation by sharing their personal story and perspective about their clinical situation. In this cross-sectional study, we contrasted the contents elicited by service users completing two individualised measures against the contents of three widely used standardised measures. We also compared two methods to generate individualised data using self-report and interview-based instruments (PSYCHLOPS and PQ). Following a thematic comparison approach, we found that one quarter of the problems reported by patients in individualised measures were not covered by any of our standardised comparators. Also, half of our sample generated at least one problem whose theme was not covered by any of the three standardised measures. We also found that patients in this population have many other concerns beyond drug use. These included psychological (e.g. interpersonal relationships) and socio-economic (e.g. money) problems, which were frequently reported. Our study suggests that listening to service users’ stories allows us to capture issues of importance to service users in substance use treatment, which may be underestimated by standardised measures

Taking Art School Online in Response to COVID 19: From Rapid Response to Realising Potential

In response to COVID 19 higher education worldwide underwent a rapid shift, moving learning and teaching to the online environment. This shift in pedagogy and practice fundamentally challenged a number of disciplines and disciplinary norms, none more so than studio-based art and design institutions. As a result, academic staff and those in professional service roles were required to rapidly engage with digital technologies with which they were unfamiliar, adjusting their pedagogic approach and innovating within the online environment. This article presents a small-scale study investigating the impact of this rapid change on a small specialist studio-based higher education institution which prioritises physical making and in person teaching within its educational provision. The study focused on how the shift influenced the perceptions and practices of teaching and professional support staff in their use of learning technologies and what newly adopted approaches to technology enhanced art and design education may likely continue post COVID 19

Learning from the past to inform the future: a survey of consultant nurses in emergency care

This paper reports the findings of a survey of UK consultant nurses in emergency care. The purpose of the survey was to elicit information regarding level of preparation for the consultant nurse role, the use of formal competency frameworks, current clinical scope of practice and perspectives on future preparation for the role. A semi-structured questionnaire was emailed to consultant nurses in emergency care. Respondents had an average of only 2 years in post and for 24% of respondents this was their second post as a consultant nurse. The survey identified that three quarters of the respondents had no specific preparation for the consultant nurse role. The remainder had varying levels of preparation ranging from brief induction to 6-month clinical training. It could be argued that this diversity of preparation is a reflection of the lack of clarity regarding the consultant nurse role and the ill-defined organisational frameworks within which some consultant nurse posts were established. With the exception of the expert practice domain and clinical leadership, the majority of respondents felt under prepared for one or more elements of the consultant nurse role. Clinically their scope of practice ranged from managing patients with minor illness or injury, to leading resuscitation teams. There was great inequity in the level of preparation for the role, particularly in the transformational leadership, education and training, and practice and service development domains. Strategies for addressing these deficiencies are identified