 |
 |
Happy New Year! yes, this is a good topic. (my first posting since joining - I've been lurking for a while...) At Greenwich, we set up an Educational Development Unit Student Forum 2++ years ago. Its quite small and, so far, there has been a fair bit of variation year by year. We pay some Student Forum Leaders who help us run the Student Forum, and to plan and run activities such as focus groups, evaluation processes and workshops, and we have a Student Forum membership who are invited to participate on a voluntary basis. Many who sign up never respond or participate, but some do, with significant value for them as well as for us. The main focus of our work this year is on the Greenwich Graduate - student-led workshops, and a student-produced guide to the Greenwich Graduate. It also gives us a pool of students to invite to participate in all sorts of things as they come up - for example, I helped facilitate a training day for library staff last week and issued a Student Forum invite. Only one student responded, but he had a great experience (is just writing a blog post about it) and staff valued student input in discussion groups very highly indeed. Its pretty small scale and relatively low cost (though cost in staff time is hard to measure). Theres a bit more about it at: (2012) "An educational development student forum: working partnerships with students", Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, Vol. 4 Iss: 2, pp.186 - 202. very happy to discuss further and looking forward to responses from others. best Sally