Student-faculty partnership in design: Evaluating a co-creation practice and sharing of findings within the South African higher education context

Abstract

Creation of content in the higher education context has long been considered as a faculty responsibility. However, a drive towards inclusive curriculum transformation was requested by both students and professional accreditation bodies. Teamwork, as part of partnerships and co-creation, is seen as a critical skill for socio-economic development throughout the world, with the industry expecting competent team players. Faculty has long been incorporating teamwork into modules; however, teaching teamwork and tracking these skills remain challenging. Thus, leaving a gap where students form groups and work in teams without the cognisance to improve their teamwork skills or increase the reliability and validity of evaluating team members’ participation and contributions.

In the absence of a comprehensive institutional resource on teamwork fundamentals, this study explores the co-creation of such a resource by post-graduate students at a higher education institution in South Africa. As higher education institutions, we assess students on teamwork skills, but we never specifically teach this to students, this resource is addressing this specific need. This will enable higher education institutions to report on assurance of learning where students can demonstrate the competency to effectively work in teams. A project approach was followed in the design of the teamwork resource based on Mayer’s Principles for designing multimedia for e-learning. Tuckman’s five stage development process informed the content design. The project ran over three weeks with weekly scrum meetings monitored by faculty. The study found that co-creating content with students is possible. However, student partnerships can enable quality improvement of teaching and assessing teamwork skills.

Finally, the researchers will outline how the practical strategies for enacting partnership, as suggested in the literature, were considered in their practice.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

A.J.M. Botha, University of Pretoria
Head Education Consultant (Department for Education Innovation)
A.A. Steyn, Department of Informatics University of Pretoria

Department of Informatics

Senior Lecturer

References

Binkley, M., O. Erstad, J. Herman, S. Raizen, M. Ripley, M. Miller-Ricci and M. Rumble. 2012. Defining twenty-first century skills. In Assessment and teaching of 21st century skills, ed. P. Griffin, B. McGaw and E. Care. Springer, Dordrecht.

Botha, A., A. A. Steyn, L. Weilbach and E. Muller. 2018. Using the iPeer LMS feature to evaluate peer participation in teamwork for assessment “as learning”: Lessons learned. In Lecture notes in computer science, ed. T. Hao, W. Chen, H. Xie, W. Nadee and R. Lau, Vol 11284. Springer, Cham (SCOPUS).

Botha, A., S. Bezuidenhout, L. du Plessis, E. Muller, A. A. Steyn, L. Weilbach, R. Jansen, J. Maritz and T. Cronje. 2019. Implementing an online tool for teamwork assessment in real time: A faculty initiative across disciplines. In The 5th e-learning excellence awards: An anthology of case histories 2019, ed. D. Remenyi. ACPIL.

Bovill, C. 2019a. Student–staff partnerships in learning and teaching: An overview of current practice and discourse. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/03098265. 2019.1660628.

Bovill, C. 2019b. A co-creation of learning and teaching typology: What kind of co-creation are you planning or doing? International Journal for Students as Partners 3(2). https://doi.org/ 10.15173/ijsap.v3i2.3953.

Bovill, C. and C. Woolmer. 2019. How conceptualisations of curriculum in higher education influence student-staff co-creation in and of the curriculum. Higher Education 78: 407–422. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10734-018-0349-8.

Cook-Sather, A., C. Bovill and P. Felten. 2014. Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching. Jossey-Bass, USA.

Harvey, L. 2007. Epistemology of quality. Perspectives in Education 25(3): 1‒13

Jackson, D., R. Sibson and L. Riebe. 2014. Undergraduate perceptions of the development of team-working skills. Education and Training 56(1): 7‒20. https://doi.org/10.1108/ET-01-2013-0002.

Jones, A. 2019. The Tuckman’s Model implementation, effect, and analysis and the new development of Jones LSI Model on a small group. Journal of Management 6(4): 23‒28. DOI: 10.34218/JOM.6.4.2019.005.

Matei, L. and J. Iwanska. 2016. Quality assurance in higher education: A practical handbook. 1st Edition. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University ‒ Yehuda Elkana Center for Higher Education.

Mayer, R. 2009. Multimedia learning. 2nd Edition. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University press.

Pachal, M. 2019. What is the difference between quality assurance and quality control? https://www.quora.com/profile/Mayur-Panchal-118 (Accessed 25 May 2019).

Sanders, E. B. N. and P. J. Stappers. 2008. Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign 4(1): 5–18.

Seat, E., J. R. Parsons and W. A. Poppen. 2013. Enabling engineering performance skills: A program to teach communication, leadership, and teamwork. Journal of Engineering Education 90(1): 7. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2001.tb00561.x

Shakir, R. 2009. Soft skills at the Malaysian institutes of higher learning. Asia Pacific Education Rev. 10: 309–315. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-009-9038-8.

Steyn, A. A., J. Jordaan and S. Millard. 2017. The use of a learning management system to facilitate student-driven content design: An experiment. In Emerging technologies for education, ed. T. C. Huang, Y. M. Huang, M. Spaniol and C. H. Yuen. SETE. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Cham.

Suskie, L. 2015. Five dimensions of quality ‒ A common sense guide to accreditation and accountability. 1st Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Published
2020-11-28
How to Cite
Botha, A.J.M., and A.A. Steyn. 2020. “Student-Faculty Partnership in Design: Evaluating a Co-Creation Practice and Sharing of Findings Within the South African Higher Education Context”. South African Journal of Higher Education 34 (5), 166-76. https://doi.org/10.20853/34-5-4270.