Evaluating and Co-creating with Student Learning Developers

Abstract

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The Learning Development Centre (LDC) in the School of Health & Life Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University serves over 6000 students, of whom over 70% have off-campus placement requirements. Provision of high-quality online support materials is therefore a priority. The LDC team has developed a suite of contextualised online resources to assist students in their development of academic and digital literacies. The LDC Team undertook a project to evaluate and enhance the resources and the LDC website. This involved the use of traditional evaluation tools in addition to the more innovative use of the 'Think Aloud Method' (Ericsson and Simon, 1984), to assess interface usability and online community content. 
A key to this project was the Team’s partnership with students, as ‘Student Learning Developers’ who played a pivotal role in the evaluation and co-creation of resources. This has helped to embed a culture of student collaboration within the LDC. In addition to showcasing the community and sharing students’ experiences of participating in the project, this submission will include discussion about effective ways of creating, evaluating and promoting online learning development resources, together with the LDC team’s reflections on partnership working with students.