Co-creation for collaborative curriculum design

An exploration into a staff-student partnership in co-creating staff development activities

Abstract

The Office for Students has become a priority for higher education institutions with its B outcomes aiming to enhance students’ academic experience. Higher education institutions are now more than ever seeking ways to improve student outcomes and design a high-quality student experience.

Staff-student partnerships have been long recognised as one way of improving the student experience, with rapid growth of partnership schemes at institutions across the UK (Healey & Healey, 2019). As an early adopter, Birmingham City University (BCU) have an established history of staff-student partnerships (Thomas, 2012), however previous little application of these principles had been made to the institution’s staff development activities.

This paper presents a staff-student co-creation project undertaken to re-design a staff development course at BCU. Relaunching this course in a post-pandemic era provided opportunity to co-create a course which embedded the student voice throughout. This paper will discuss our experiences and approach to redesigning this staff development activity. It will include reflections on the value of embedding ‘the student voice’ in staff development activities to improve student engagement and will conclude with a discussion of further opportunities for student-led academic development activities in the wider Higher Education sector.