Working as Partners: Course Development by a Student–Teacher Team

Abstract

A first-year undergraduate course at Uppsala University has been redesigned in a process exploring different levels of student participation. In the first part of the project, the student voice was heard through interviews focusing on the role of the course in the degree program. In the second part, a student-teacher team was formed to develop course curriculum and teaching material in partnership. Among the implemented changes were new seminars focusing on conceptual understanding, redesign of all lectures to include active student participation, and a change of the course literature. The redesigned course significantly increased student satisfaction compared to previous years. Important success factors were involvement of the student organization to promote the project, institutional support, early selection of concrete development tasks, and allowing team members to choose what they wanted to develop according to their own expertise. Keywords Student engagement, Course curriculum, Student voice, Students as partners Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Cover Page FootnoteWe thank Maja Elmgren for continuous support and helpful comments on the manuscript, and Felix Ho for auditing a project meeting and gathering reflections from project members. We would also like to thank Johan Wickström, Ulrike Schnaas, Susanna Barrineau and Alexis Bergström for helpful discussions. Financial support was obtained from a TUFF pedagogical development grant from the Disciplinary Domain of Science and Technology, Uppsala University. A first-year undergraduate course at Uppsala University has been redesigned in a process exploring different levels of student participation. In the first part of the project, the student voice was heard through interviews focusing on the role of the course in the degree program. In the second part, a student-teacher team was formed to develop course curriculum and teaching material in partnership. Among the implemented changes were new seminars focusing on conceptual understanding, redesign of all lectures to include active student participation, and a change of the course literature. The redesigned course significantly increased student satisfaction compared to previous years. Important success factors were involvement of the student organization to promote the project, institutional support, early selection of concrete development tasks, and allowing team members to choose what they wanted to develop according to their own expertise.

Virtual Patient Cases for Active Student Participation in Nursing Education —Students’ Learning Experiences

“…The students' use of VP cases in this study might be associated with a didactic method, which supports active student participation (ASP). Previous research has found that ASP provides students with a more active role in their own learning, which increases motivation, supports in-depth learning, and improves understanding of the subject (Barrineau et al, 2019;Bengtson et al, 2017). Consequently, VP cases have the potential to stimulate and motivate ASP in the learning of clinical reasoning (Forsberg, Ziegert, Hult, & Fors, 2016).…”

“…Our intention was to reduce lectures by teachers in order to create more quality in teaching through, for example, more time for seminar discussions of the VP cases where students learn to practice peer tutoring. The term ASP means different things depending on the context in which it is used (Bengtson et al, 2017), but common to the different definitions of ASP is increased student participation in teaching. For example, in the seminars for the VP cases the students can be a resource in each other's learning.…”

“…For example, in the seminars for the VP cases the students can be a resource in each other's learning. Through ASP the students take on a more active role in their own learning, which increases their motivation and supports in-depth learning and promotes understanding of the subject (Barrineau et al, 2019;Bengtson et al, 2017). VP cases also have the potential to stimulate and motivate active learning of the clinical reasoning process (Consorti, Mancuso, Nocioni, & Piccolo, 2012;Forsberg et al, 2016).…”

Value Co-Creation in the Tunnel Engineering Course Design and Implementation

“…The practice of co-created curricula in higher education [5] implied that information sharing is vital to interaction and co-creation [6], and feedback gives the chance of taking student's views seriously. The interaction should start in the course development, such as through student-teacher team work [7]. During the course plan implementation, the effective participation of the whole class is beneficial and important to the co-creation in learning and teaching [8].…”

Culture of engagement

“…Assessment is recognized as a heavily staff-dominated curriculum area as teachers are ultimately responsible for ensuring fair and accurate grading (Croft et al, 2013). Student partners have often limited prior experience with assessment development (Cook-Sather et al, 2014) and may therefore actively choose to refrain from it (Bengtson et al, 2017). Partnerships risk being less productive if student partners lack the power to make real changes (Robinson, 2012;Bovill et al, 2016).…”