Eugenia Cacciatori, Lauren Regan and Ali Tabba

This presentation will outline a project where students were involved in the redesign of City services in LEaD, as part of their 3rd year elective module ‘Design Thinking for the Digital Age’ at Bayes Business School. Students were asked to improve the services LEaD offers in two areas: (i) lecturers’ support, to facilitate the use of digital technologies in teaching; and (ii) students’ support, to facilitate the acquisition of the key digital skills students need for their studies. It will highlight the benefits and challenges of the project and how it provided a valuable formative experience for the students and insights for LEaD.

We will discuss the experiences of the module leader and LEaD staff in co-designing an authentic, formative, and engaging assessment in the form of student projects with ‘real’ clients. It will also address LEaD’s experience of being a client for such a project; and students’ experience of working on such a project. The presentation will discuss how the topic and scope of the project were defined, how the students engaged in it, and the benefits and challenges for the students and the clients.

From the student’s point of view, they had an opportunity to leverage the design thinking tools provided in the module in a quasi-real life context, and gain experience with their practical application, including in relation to empathizing and designing for users who work behind the scenes of their education (Healey, Flint and Harrington, 2014). From LEaD’s point of view, the findings the students shared not only provided valuable feedback on the service already on offer, but also provided insight and ideas for how the projects could be expanded to further support students and staff (Jisc, 2015). The use of students’ projects about services provided by University could be expanded. For instance, there might be opportunities for students in computer science or health sciences to look at IT services or student well-being services. These projects are useful to students as a way to gain employability skills in a half-way house between university and external places of employment, while being motivating in that students have a chance to improve services whose output affects them directly. At the same time, their work provides very useful insights, so that these projects are a win-win for both students and ‘clients’.

Session participants will:

Gain an understanding of the process of designing assessments based on collaboration with real clients that operate in a university and are particularly sensitive to the formative value of the project
Understand the benefits of partaking in this type of project for all stakeholders involved, and in particular in regard to UG education.

Indicative questions for discussions:

An important set of questions is around how scalable the approach is.

Can it be scaled and what would be needed to do so (e.g., how to identify the services and explain the value of the projects, how to address the concerns the City services might have – particularly how to make sure that the process has a little ‘overheads’ in time for everyone involved; can we have large number of students interview and observe members of staff?)

If there are limits to scalability, what would the best criteria be for identifying modules and services to be involved?

Timings:

20 minutes presentation shared by module leader, LEaD, and student
10 minutes for participant questions with discussion prompts

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Eugenia Cacciatori, Lauren Regan and Ali Tabba

References