Abstract
The UCL ChangeMakers scheme supports students and staff to work in partnership to enhance the University College London (UCL) learning experience. In 2014/15 we piloted the scheme with 10 projects run by 24 students in collaboration with 11 staff members. This paper will focus on our evaluation efforts of the pilot year through 4 illustrative case studies highlighting the successes and challenges of 4 projects. We focused our discussion on how projects were defined, what role students and staff should have had in defining the projects, and the sustainability of the projects once the student moves on or graduates. From our case study analysis, our findings revealed that a series of partnership values—collective responsibility, honesty, plurality, and trust—need to be considered in order to have an impact on the sustainability of the project and, more importantly, on the learning experience for students.
Highlights
Students in higher education are invited to act as partners in curricular processes designed to enhance engagement and ownership in their own learning process
UCL ChangeMakers is an initiative at University College London (UCL) that fosters, sustains, and supports partnership projects focused on changing current teaching and learning practices
The table below shows the activity of 10 projects from the first year: what happened during the year, project outputs and what, if any, sustainable outcomes the project had following the project’s completion
Summary
Students in higher education are invited to act as partners in curricular processes designed to enhance engagement and ownership in their own learning process. UCL ChangeMakers is an initiative at University College London (UCL) that fosters, sustains, and supports partnership projects focused on changing current teaching and learning practices. UCL is a research-intensive university with a full range of academic disciplines It has approximately 38,000 students, almost 18,000 of whom are undergraduates. In its fourth year, the UCL ChangeMakers initiative has progressed and evolved from a “students as change agents” model (Dunne & Zandstra, 2011), which has arisen in the UK from the University of Exeter scheme of the same name. UCL ChangeMakers has moved away from this model, whereby the university empowers students to initiate and run their own enhancement projects towards a model where students work as partners alongside staff, determining and carrying out projects collaboratively. No record was kept of student reasons for dropping projects
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