Employability skills -

Recently gathered evidence suggests that there is a disconnect between the skills students feel they have developed and those that employers are seeking in prospective employees. Furthermore, it appears that students are somewhat unaware of many key skills they have developed through their degree and thus will be less prepared to give examples for these skills when asked to do so in job applications and interviews.

This project pilots a badging scheme aimed at increasing students' awareness of the skills they develop through small tasks and lab experiments in three chemistry modules. This is done by highlighting the relevant sections of the Moodle page and lab protocols with the skills badges relevant to that task or experiment.

The skills badges are:

Should the project prove successful (measured through student surveys and focus groups), it will be scaled throughout other chemistry modules and, ultimately, across the Warwick and Monash institutions.

Highlighting interdisciplinarity -

Although many aspects of chemistry overlap with other disciplines, anecdotal evidence suggests that chemistry students rarely acknowledge this and, rather than opening their eyes to the wider implications of the content of the modules they are taking, they have a relatively narrow perspective.

This project aims to gather data to support (or otherwise) this hypothesis from chemists through years 1-4 and then pilot a badging scheme aimed at increasing students' awareness of the interdisciplinary nature of tasks and lab experiments in two chemistry lab modules. This is done by highlighting the relevant sections of the Moodle page and lab protocols with the interdisciplinarity badges relevant to that task or experiment.

The current badges are:

Should the project prove successful (measured through student surveys and focus groups), it will be scaled throughout other chemistry modules and, ultimately, across the institution.

Note that a broad definition of interdisciplinarity has been used here that would encompass terms such as cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary.

Project team:

Employability skills:

Michele Hill (Monash)

Professor Tina Overton (Monash)

Dr Chris Thompson (Monash)

Dr Russ Kitson (Warwick)

Highlighting interdisciplinarity:

Karishma Patel

Dr Russ Kitson