A Students as Partners approach using a personal learning platform for democratic negotiations, assessment and reflections

Abstract

In 1964, Bob Dylan released “The times they are a-changin” and although he wasn’t referring to higher education in the 21st century, it is an apt description of transformations currently occurring in the sector. There has been a noticeable reduction in student engagement in higher education over recent years, particularly in traditional lectures (Armbruster et al., 2009). We have also observed a reluctance of students to participate even in small problem-based tutorials. At the same time, we became aware of an increasing trend towards building partnerships between students and academics, with both parties contributing to the learning and teaching (Healy et al., 2014). The “Students as Partners” (SaP) approach is supported by the growing number of publications reporting the positive outcomes of involving SaP, which included: increased engagement, improved relationships, enhancement in student learning and a sense of being part a community (Cook-Sather et al., 2014; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017). We adopted a SaP approach to enhance the engagement in a second year biochemistry course. We thought that giving the students a choice in what was taught and allowing them to design assessment would encourage them be more engaged or have a vested interest in the course. Our strategy was three-fold: 1. Provide students with a choice of topics for part of the course; 2. Create an opportunity for students to design multiple choice questions for assessment, with scaffolding; and 3. Provide a forum for student reflection on their partnership experiences. In this paper, we discuss the simple but effective strategies we used to engage students in the partnership, such as a democratic process to determine part of the curriculum and how designing assessment questions was a powerful active-learning task. Furthermore, we discuss students’ unexpected, honest and uninhibited reflections of their partnership experiences.