Month: August 2022

Supporting departmental student society in improving students’ experience and sense of belonging

Fiona A Wilkie Leave a Comment
The team
Staff: Dr Yulia Ioffe
PhD Student: Mhari Gordon
MSc Student: Kim-Anh Anastasia Chau
BSc Student: Libby Kay
Department
Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR)
What happened?
The idea started with student representatives at the Staff-Student Consultative Committee mentioning students’ feelings of isolation and desire for more social interaction. A student survey was sent at the beginning of the ChangeMakers project (with 30 respondents) where students expressed the desire for a department society in order to improve the student experience, sense of belonging, and collaborative environment society. This ChangeMakers project aimed to gather the opinions of current students of the IRDR to formulate recommendations for the upcoming new department student society. This project benefits the current 170 students of the IRDR and is expected to benefit the creation of the student society and future IRDR students as the overall student number is expected to grow in the next 5 years to 500 students. In order to capture the wider views and be representative of the IRDR student community, the team comprised of a student from each cohort (BA, MSc and PhD). Furthermore, the project was run in collaboration with a staff member. To meet the project aim, the team organized and ran both a focus group discussion (FGD) session, including 12 students (4 per cohort), as well as social events open to all IRDR students, including a tea and coffee morning and pub evening. After the FGD and events, the team met to discuss the success of the project and write a report to hand over recommendations to the new department society. Overall, the findings were that the IRDR students wanted a more vibrant student community and the ChangeMakers team was able to identify social events that students want next year, such as regular social events which are per cohort, across cohorts and with alumni, including activities such as picnics, game nights and museum trips, as well as taking part in activism, volunteering, and seasonal activities including ice-skating trip and end of term dinners. The team is confident that the new department student society will start with strong based on the contributions and recommendations of the efforts from the ChangeMakers team and the ‘starter kit’ report.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Taking part in a UCL ChangeMakers project reinforces the feeling of belonging in the department, a great way to get to know students from other cohorts, as well as the wider UCL community. It is rewarding to contribute to building the student’s sense of belonging and identity by supporting the development of a new society. To know the project will be impactful, you should start by questioning what would be very valuable to the student community you are part of. This can be achieved by running surveys or simply discussing with your peers. To ensure the project is successful, set targeted and quantifiable goals. Set and follow clear deadlines. Discuss with your colleagues or staff if you experience difficulties. Organize reflective sessions.

History of Art Assessment Review

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The team
Dr Jacob Paskins (project lead), Eleanor Day (staff), Poppy Souglides (student support), Hossein Abbas Asadi (student support)
Department

History of Art

What happened?
The History of Art Assessment Review ChangeMakers project encouraged students to get involved with an important aspect of the department’s curriculum review. The project team wanted to learn more about student perceptions of assessment, from the different kinds of activities they currently undertake to the quantity and frequency of assessment. We also wanted to gain better understanding of the support students need when preparing different kinds of assessment during their studies. During the project, we recruited two student Assessment Change Champions (ACCs) who co-designed with departmental staff an online survey to canvas the opinion of current History of Art undergraduates. The ACCs promoted the survey widely to ensure a robust response rate across year groups. The project also included a lunchtime workshop that brought together students and staff to discuss their assessment needs and concerns in more detail. Students also had the opportunity to think about new and more diverse forms of assessment that the department could introduce in the future. The ACCs helped analyse the survey data, which will form part an Assessment Review Report. The report will identify aspects of assessment that are proving to be effective, and highlight areas that need attention or change. These priorities will be discussed at the History of Art Departmental Teaching Committee, which oversees changes to assessment design, and sets priorities for student skills training. Participants in the ChangeMakers project commented that although they may not personally benefit from future changes to assessment in the department, they appreciated the opportunity to share their own experiences and were glad to be able to help plan for more inclusive and authentic assessments for future cohorts of art historians.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
ChangeMakers is a great opportunity to bring students and staff together to work on a project that can bring about real change. The question of assessment is clearly a matter of concern for many students, so this project generated a lot of interest. A project like this does take a lot of time to organise, from the design of the project, completion of the application, recruitment and training of participants, design, promotion and analysis of the survey, organisation of the workshops, and writing of the final report. Undertaking the project during teaching terms is very demanding, but after a successful and energetic student workshop, it is clear that the effort is worth it. The most positive part of the project was seeing students’ enthusiasm for discussing their experiences of assessment. If anything, the project was a little too ambitious as the different activities have generated so much material that the writing of the final report will take longer than expected. And while we have identified a number of quick fixes to assessment problems, most of the issues will take much longer to resolve as they will require careful review from departmental committees before major changes can take place.

REACT: REconceptualising Architectural studio Crits and Teaching practice

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The team
Staff: Maxwell Mutanda, Lecturer in Environmental and Spatial Equity, MAHUE
Lakshmi Priya Rajendran, Lecturer in Environmental and Spatial Equity, MAHUE
Lead Students: Jude Jabali, MAHUE [Chevening Scholar Palestine]
Ajmona Hoxha, MAHUE [Chevening Scholar Albania]
Department
Bartlett School of Architecture
What happened?
REACT is a co-constructive dialogue series to be held within the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments (MAHUE) programme at the BSA. The project focuses on one of the most characteristic pedagogic activities in architectural education, the crit. The crit — a hallmark of architectural professional education delivery and the traditional culmination of a design studio — is the place where work is shared, critiqued, reviewed or developed and a foundation for students to develop critical design thinking. However, there is growing and legitimate criticism around how and why crits are undertaken, and the negative impact this is having on students and in particular female or Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students (de Graft-Johnson, Manley and Greed 2003, CABE 2004). The project is student led and the main output of the project is creating a short film which captures and reflects on the student experiences during the crit session and how it transform the learning and teaching experience in MAHUE
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
It is important to make sure the project is well advertised to encourage more involvement from faculty and student members.

Supporting students with mental health difficulties during their studies

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The team
Staff lead: Sarah Rowe
PGTA lead: Aisha Alyafei
MSc student leads: Hania Khatib, Magdalena Tomaskova
MSc students: Heema Ajeet Gokani, Alejandro Arguelles Bullon, Ruby Jarvis, Hannah Williams, Zahra Fatima, Melisa Yilmaz
PhD student and Lived experience mentor/Peer support group lead: Natasha Lyons
Department

Division of Psychiatry

What happened?
For our project we wanted to know how effectively we support students with mental health difficulties during their time on our one-year MSc programme. It is important to raise awareness of the accessibility of support on the MSc, particularly to international students or those who may be less familiar with how to navigate mental health support. We also want to promote a supportive and inclusive environment on our MSc. We conducted focus groups with past and current students who have lived experience of mental health difficulties, about the various sources of support we offer on our MSc (e.g. lived experience bursary, lived experience mentor, peer support group), and wider mental health support via the university, and where there may be gaps we need to address. Upon completing our focus groups, some of the key things we found were: 1) students are often aware that there’s mental health support but not the specifics about what is available and how to access these. 2) students often feel overloaded with information and emails at the beginning of the year when this information is provided 3) the processes when applying for support felt lengthy and discouraging, 4) academic support provided by the MSc team e.g. extensions, was viewed as being efficient and helpful, 5) feeling connected to their peers, peer support and social activities had a positive influence on a student’s mental health. These findings informed two separate guidance documents – one for students and one for programmes/departments – on how to support students with mental health difficulties during their studies. We produced a blog to promote the sources of support available via the MSc programme, and a case study for programme teams at UCL.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
To ensure a successful and impactful ChangeMakers project, drafting a plan as early as possible with clear project tasks and deadlines is key. Allocating roles and tasks amongst the project team members and frequent meetings to incorporate everyone’s ideas and perspectives will help enrich the project. Taking notes throughout the project and during meetings helps keep things on track and keeps records of completed tasks. Teamwork is vital. As this project required many individuals to come together and contribute, establishing initial face to face meetings can help instil a sense of connectedness and comfort between team members working together.

Re-launching the Education Society for Long-term Community Engagement

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The team
Project lead students: Molly Edwards and Leow Tian Ahn
Project support students: Youvin Lawela Kim and Noa Adan
Staff: Mark Freeman and Georgina Brewis
Department
Education, Practice and Society
What happened?
Our project was to re-establish the Education Society and lay the foundations for its longevity, as this is not something that had been achieved by previous cohorts despite their efforts. We decided to do this, because we felt a lack of community and belonging among students in our course, as well as a disconnect between staff and students who had only met each other online, due to the pandemic. Since then, we have worked in partnership with our staff leaders and with the help of ChangeMakers to create a society that addresses this issue. We first held elections for ten roles we viewed as necessary to the society’s success. Some of the students in the committee were responsible for creating an Instagram page for our society where we could share our events with students, but also create ‘Day in the Life’ videos and opportunity posts for students to feel more connected. This page now has over 100 followers. We have also hosted numerous events for students, such as a series of coffee chats some of which were in collaboration with members of staff and the Psychology with Education society, an Easter Egg Hunt, and a Fancy Dress Strike. We are continuing to use our platform to connect with staff and students and we are seeing more engagement with the Education Society as our platform grows. It is clear that there was a need for a student focused, staff supported initiative like the Education Society, and with the ChangeMakers’ support and funding we have been able to launch this society and initiative in a way that we would not have been able to do otherwise.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
I would advise anyone starting a project to discuss it with as many people who you might want to be involved as possible and gain any feedback you can. The staff in our student/staff partnership were really knowledgeable about what had and had not worked in the past, how we could figure out some of the more logistical obstacles and how to manage a project like this. We also informally talked with students to figure out exactly what they wanted and expected from their university experience, so we had an idea of where improvement was needed and how we could address it with our society. I would also just suggest students take this opportunity and do as much as they can with it. The Education Society has been an amazing project to work on, but it has also given those involved more opportunities to engage in other projects in different ways and create new initiatives with the support of the Education Society. I think one change can really lead to another and with the support and structure of ChangeMakers there is definitely more opportunity for you to make positive, impactful change if you embrace it.

Decolonising a Sexual Health Curriculum

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The team
Julia Bailey (lead)
Mayra Salazar Volkmann, Haoyue Guo, Kara Smythe (support).
Department
Research Department of Primary Care and Population Health
What happened?
This project is a module review for the iBSc Sexual Health module, which took a decolonising lens to look at sexual health in social contexts, meaning to acknowledge and remove the influences of colonialism in knowledge construction. To review our approach to decolonising medical education, we started this project in 2021 and received support from the Changemakers grant to disseminate our results. To gather data, we reviewed literature in the field and interviewed the session facilitators of the module, students, and the module lead. With their views and opinions, we were able to reflect on how decolonisation was perceived in sexual health education, what went well with our attempt to bring the element of decolonisation to the class, and what can be improved. We have shared our findings with departmental staff and PhD students through a workshop, and we have plans to further the impact of this piece of work through blogs, journal articles, and seminars.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Time management and distribution of workload is absolutely key for teamwork. Since we already collected data before getting changemakers funding, we initially thought time wouldn’t be a problem. However, we finished analysis and preparation for dissemination just in time and it was only achieved because we set clear deadlines and divided up work clearly.

‘Critical Medicine’ Teaching Series: a DtMC x EDI collaboration

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The team

Student team: Tina Plowman (Year 6) – lead

Support students: Davina Puri (Year 5), Anjana Narasimhan (Year 4), Lauren Pereira-Greene (Year 2), Anaiya Kaka (Year 2), Srishti Agarwal (Year 4), Shem Braithwaite (Year 3).

Staff team: Lois Haruna-Cooper, Jayne Kavanagh, Sarah Wong (FY1, honorary teaching fellow).

Department
UCL Medical School
What happened?
We received UCL Changemaker’s funding to run our Critical Medicine Workshop Series, a second collaboration between Decolonising the Medical Curriculum working group and the UCLMS EDI Committee. This was designed to be a free series of interactive workshops open to all UCL Medical Students. The topics ranged from Psychiatry, with our workshop on at St Pancras hospital to the History of Medicine with a tour by one of the curators of the new History of Medicine exhibition at the Science Museum. The overall aim was to develop critical thinking skills applicable to medicine in both theory and practice. Having a critical consciousness enables students to recognise inequality and power structures within healthcare, much like wider society, and through these workshops we had discussions on directions for the future of medicine (and us medical students) to work towards health equity. We got feedback via forms and also by video – so watch this space for the final report and summary video clip!
For more information, find us on:
FB – Critical Medicine: https://www.facebook.com/criticalmedicine
FB – Decolonising the Medical Curriculum: https://www.facebook.com/groups/decolonisingmed
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DecolonisingMed WordPress: https://decolonisingthemedicalcurriculum.wordpress.com
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
– The project might turn out different from how you planned but time management is the key – have a structure and timeline with milestones to track your progress and also recognise when to wrap up! – Keep in contact with the Changemaker’s team and faculty for advice and support – even if it is just to let them know everything is going well!

A manifest on ‘module design’; student edition

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The team
Staff: Eleni Makrinou, Janice Kiugu
Students: Loris Marcel, Ronnie Alexander-Passe, Emma Pryke, Keerat Singh, Oliver Hood
Department

Structural and Molecular Biology

What happened?
Our project aims to offer an insight into the development of academic modules as shaped by the current pedagogical trends, while taking into account the students’ perspective. The objective is to improve and enhance the learning experience, considering current developments, emerging needs and job orientations, while giving at the same time students the opportunity to be heard and share the responsibility of shaping the future of the academic sector. Therefore, using as an exemplar a new year 3 module, on life in extreme environmental habitats that we plan to launch for the academic year 2023_24 we created a survey questionnaire that was disseminated in our Y2, Y3 and Y4 SMB students. A similar survey will be disseminated to the SMB teaching staff so that we can compare and reflect upon the views of both parties; our students and their lecturers. We wish to draw upon the expertise of teaching staff and the students’ perspective and create report based on a recommendation model of learning that become available at faculty level.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Changemakers is a wonderful way to enhance partnership between students and staff. Make sure the participants have a vision and feel positive about bringing a change.

Creativity vs Consistency: Evaluating the student online learning experience in MAPS

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The team

Staff: Richard Osborne, Sophia Macblain

Students: Baljeet Kaur, Zuzanna Kocjan, Surrabhi Luthra, Noella Kalasa, Shim Shim, Mark Rassam, Kate Trollope, Anita Allikmets, Raj Ramani, Jiguang Yu

Department

MAPS faculty office

What happened?
One of the consequences of the global pandemic that began in March 2020 was a huge increase in use of the centrally managed Moodle Virtual Learning Environment at UCL. Realising this early on, the Digital Education team responsible for supporting the VLE acted rapidly to produce extra guidance and support so that new content could be produced to a high standard. However, this was very much a self-service model, as the number of support staff available to help adapt existing content fell far short of providing one-to-one assistance. The sheer volume of new content that was required, under very short timescales, combined with a wide level of digital literacy across the academic population, naturally led in turn to a wide range in quality in terms of the content that was created. Subsequent student surveys, run not only in the MAPS faculty but also across UCL – and indeed the wider sector – revealed the impact of this wide range in quality in terms of the student experience. Whilst individual modules were often in themselves internally consistent, and potentially even very creative, students tended to have a wider ‘diet’ of modules than individual staff perceived, hence they had to contend with a wide range of course design choices, approaches to organization, and activity types, to name but three elements of online course creation. The purpose of this project was to evaluate the student experience of online learning by analysing all currently running modules in the MAPS faculty, utilising a simplified version of the guidance on good practice created by Digital Education. The overall objective was twofold: to reveal the extent of good practice across the faculty, and to focus support services where they were most needed. Early analysis has been promising, revealing some excellent organising of student activities, clear contact and communications, and detailed assessment information; but it has also revealed some areas where key information is absent, occasional pages which are too long and badly organised, and some missing “Have your say” sections, meaning students have no way to offer their own module evaluations. Future work is now planned to celebrate the good work that has been achieved and start to address obvious shortcomings where they have been identified.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Give yourself plenty of time to plan events and structure your project well ahead of time. Personally, I found the three stages of the project in the application form (1. Preparing, 2. Undertaking, 3. Identifying / Sharing) very useful in terms of shaping what I hoped to achieve, especially when used alongside the UCL calendar.

Gendered self-perception and implicit gender bias in virtual reality

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The team

Project lead: Mx Lucile Bottein, staff co-lead: Dr Aneesha Singh, PhD student Miss Leya George

Department
UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC)
What happened?
Virtual reality (VR) is becoming increasingly used beyond the world of gaming; it is taking on an educational role in some cases, and may in the future facilitate remote working and learning (especially considering the rise of hybrid teaching/working with COVID). However, this may have harmful effects if not accompanied by rigorous and critical research. Specifically, using VR often involves the embodiment of an avatar, and the perceived identity of this avatar can have positive and/or negative effects on the cognition of the person embodying it. Our project aims to investigate how embodying female avatars might adversely impact implicit gender bias depending on how objectified this avatar is. Findings can indicate avenues of progress for the use of VR in educational/interventional contexts.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Changemakers is a fantastic avenue to fund but also to support and organize your project. They have a large number of valuable resources and speaking with the team is always a delight. A successful project depends on many factors, one of which is a clear timeline (which accounts for the many delays and hiccups you will meet).