WIHEA Resource Bank

The principal aim of the Academic Literacies Learning Circle is to investigate and challenge the ways staff and students think about reading and writing in academia. We aim to do this by offering a space for rethinking how we teach, assess and produce writing. We held a one-day symposium (Friday 3 May 2024) to provide such a space.

• Symposium poster

This project aimed to advance equity and inclusion at the University of Warwick by redeveloping an established anti-racism induction training, originally created for medical students that has been mandatory for student to complete from 2021/2 academic year. This co-creation project aimed to broaden its scope to make a foundational training on Anti-Racism available across the student body.

• The anti-racism training
• Departmental resources on 'Foundations in Racial Equity'

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This small fund project built on the successful WIHEA funded project'Building Values-Based Learning and Pedagogy in Sports Coaching'.

It supported dissemination of the aims of the project, with members of the team attending and speaking at three conferences in the summer of 2024:

• International Sports and Discrimination Conference
• Warwick Inclusion Conference
• Breaking Barriers in Sports EDI Conference

The primary objective of this project was to examine the utilization of digital technologies across various phases of the learning cycle as students progress from one module to another and from year to year.

• Focus Groups: We successfully conducted five focus groups involving both staff and students. These sessions generated insightful questions that highlight the digital skills required at various stages of academic progression. The discussions helped identify key gaps in digital skills, forming a solid foundation for the subsequent development of the questionnaire.
• Questionnaire Development: A comprehensive set of questions has been developed for distribution to students across various disciplines in follow-up studies. This questionnaire is designed to capture students' experiences and needs related to digital skills, assessing their digital literacy, proficiency with specific software, and the integration of these skills into their academic work.
• Co-Creation: A significant milestone of the project was the active involvement of both staff and students in every phase across different parts of the University. This collaborative approach ensured that the outputs are not only relevant but also closely aligned with actual academic experiences.

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The mathematical sciences and operational research (MSOR) community in HE is poorly prepared to adapt to the rapid rise of AI. Whilst in-person exams remain an essential assessment mode for our subjects, take-home assignments are also an integral assessment tool. However, our current assignments are not robust against AI, and staff have no time to capture ways in which AI might be used to enhance learning.

Recent AI studies in HE tend to cover a broad range of subjects without the specific needs of mathematical sciences being properly considered. According to the QAA benchmark for MSOR, students “can sometimes be expected to provide an answer which is very close to a model answer”, whilst AI can often provide such model answers. This project aimed to address these issues and make suggestions, specific to MSOR subjects, on how maths assessments could be adapted to work with AI whilst still achieving excellent learning outcomes.

• Formal report
• Student conservations on AI usage
• Project resources/conclusions on AI

This project aimed to identify barriers for staff engagement with pedagogic resources that promote the embedding of wellbeing in the curriculum, suggesting possible ways forward and solutions.

• During the workshops, which were delivered in April and May 2024, the two resources were introduced and staff and students facilitated small group discussions among staff about their perception of the resources, difficulties in assimilating them within their own practices, concerns over proposed interventions and institutional barriers to implementation. Key themes around barriers to implementation included: Awareness of the resources and appropriate marketing of their existence; time, workload and recognition issues; wider level university support (e.g. policy, leadership buy in); concerns around how to implement, monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.
• The focus groups also highlighted the value of these toolkits for supporting both student and staff wellbeing, and made suggestions to improve uptake of these resources into practice. These included focus on advertising and marketing the resources, providing training on use of resources, seeking endorsement and buy-in from university leaders and detailing evidence about the effectiveness of such tools.
• Findings of this project will be disseminated to the Dean of Students Office and PVC Education, presented in a WIHEA Masterclass to support inclusive practice toolkit design, and through journal articles.

In 2018, the University of Warwick launched its institutional strategy, ‘Excellence with Purpose’ with interdisciplinarity viewed as essential to meet the grand challenges of 21st-century society. The Interdisciplinary Learning Circle (WIHEA-ILC) in 2018 led a project reviewing interdisciplinary teaching and learning based on ITLR 2017 data. This WIHEA ILC Project proposed to review the findings of ITLR 2023 in order to longitudinally map progress from 2017, as well as creating an interdisciplinary network (IN) and re-launching the Interdisciplinary Student Hub (IHS), a website with examples of good interdisciplinary practice.

• Project officer notes and conclusions

The project focused on exploring the conditions around the academic engagement of part-time students in History in particular, and in the Faculty of Arts in general. It aimed to identify barriers to accessibility and inclusivity that part-time students face, with a view to develop and embed practices that improve students’ academic experiences, as well as enhance practice and policy within Warwick.

• Project report

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The purpose in this pilot project was to undertake a desk-based survey, scraping publicly available information on teaching staff promotion criteria and processes adopted by comparable HE institutions, to allow for an initial cross comparison of institutional practice. The ambition was to gauge whether guidance from Advance HE has trickled through within the sector, and whether this has lead to the creation and publication of clear and transparent documentation to capture institutions' teaching staff promotion criteria and processes.

• The project successfully benchmarked the University of Warwick's reward and promotion practices for teaching-focused staff against those of other UK higher education institutions, particularly within the Russell Group. It identified Warwick as a leader in transparency, with its promotion criteria easily accessible online, setting an example for sector-wide clarity. The project also uncovered key insights into the diversity of promotion pathways across institutions, highlighting similarities in teaching and curriculum leadership criteria, but also differences such as research requirements in some institutions. Additionally, it mapped working allocation models and study leave policies, revealing a wide spectrum of practices.

• Notably, the project identified gaps in Warwick's support for teaching-focused staff, suggesting potential improvements, such as the introduction of workshops and interactive online tools. The findings provided a foundation for future research, including a sector-wide survey to capture teaching-focused professors' experiences. Overall, the project positioned Warwick to enhance its promotion strategy and support structures, while also contributing to a broader understanding of sectoral practices.

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Our student-led initiative, in partnership with AdvanceHE, has developed the Warwick Building Belonging Framework. Our comprehensive approach to understanding and addressing belonging involved a variety of engagement methods:

• AdvanceHE Belonging Questionnaire: We received a substantial response rate, surpassing that of the five other institutions on the AdvanceHE programme, providing valuable insights for our initial framework development in March 2024.
• Professional Services Feedback: We engaged with staff through the professional services network to gather their perspectives on belonging in April 2024.
• Student Listening Rooms: We conducted in-depth discussions with students to ensure their voices were central to the framework's development.
• Strategic Integration: Our team actively contributed to the University's new Education and Student Experience Strategy, particularly focusing on the Community and Connections theme.
• Knowledge Sharing: We presented a masterclass on co-creation to share our learnings and best practices in July 2024, which have been incorporated into the University's new c-creation guidance.

The resulting Warwick Belonging Framework is a practical tool for colleagues and students across the University, which aims to support the visualisation, mapping and building of belonging. It identifies four key elements that contribute to belonging and emphasises the importance of building trust. While the design of the framework is still under development, it can be effectively used in its current form.

This project builds on the success of the WIHEA-funded “Warwick Sustainability Challenge (WSUsC): a Curriculum-Campus-Community approach to sustainable teaching and learning”.

The project's methodology is being replicated beyond Warwick - in particular, the WSUsC has been replicated in two UK institutions, a school in Argentina and a university in Latvia.

The WSUsC has been published as part of the ESD guides for Advance HE.

A book chapter - 'Co-creating Sustainable Communities: The Circular Role of Higher Education' - will be published shortly.

Non-traditional learning and assessment portfolios with elements like group projects, digital platforms, and flexible learning offer substantial opportunities but may also introduce additional obstacles. This includes increased demands on self-guidance and project management. We have been developing a toolbox that facilitates students taking control of their academic success and gaining a higher level of independence, while simultaneously providing learning-by-applying opportunities for a wide skill set. These include managing time and workload, coping with stress, handling risks, carrying out projects, coordinating teams, and more.

Following the rise of awareness of the opportunities (and threats) of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, we have created an open self-selected task and finish group which aims to review and ‘imagine’ the opportunities and challenges of AI in education, including in regards to assessment. Our vision is to deploy AI as a tool to support all students, independent of background and sociodemographic characteristics, to be successful in their studies and in their future work, while ensuring academic integrity, as well as to support educators to feel confident in using AI effectively in promoting learning.

This project aimed to create a coaching training course, online resource bank and community of practice for SU sports societies’ executive members that coach (referred to as ‘student coaches’ thereafter), to support and build their confidence, knowledge and skills in their coaching role (which includes delivering training sessions). This would ultimately lead to SU sports club members being able to learn a new sport in a safer, engaged and more inclusive environment.

• One project output, and legacy of the project is the Moodle page which has been designed to provide new student coaches with the knowledge and skills needed to excel in their roles. It provides information on designing training sessions, communication, training techniques, inclusivity in sport, active bystander training as well as links to other resources. These resources are now being used and shared and can be accessed through Moodle.
• The Building Values team ran a pilot workshop for student sports coaches at the Faculty of Arts (FAB) building, University of Warwick with representatives from over 10 university sports clubs. The workshop had two goals; to gather feedback on materials we created and give participants the opportunity to develop their reflective practice as a coach. The workshop included "design a training session" and Active Bystander training for coaches.
• A VR session enabled participants to have the opportunity to try their hands at some virtual sports, with the help of the Faculty of Arts’ Dr Robert O’Toole. Positive feedback of all sessions demonstrated that what really came out of the workshop was how much our volunteer coaches care, and their contribution to university sports clubs in building a positive experience for their peers cannot be overstated.

This project explored the potential that technology can play within the course design process to create an inclusive and accessible experience for both staff and students. Building upon the experiences of support within this area from both the University of Brighton and University of Warwick, the team developed an insight into how digital tools can be used in course design. Working in collaboration with student project officers, they carried out a research project and identify mapping of tools and how they could be utilised in the design process.

A current major limitation of ChatGPT (beyond its ability to create original outputs) is the potential inaccuracy or bias of the information it delivers, and it is therefore of critical importance that students can critically engage with the answers generated by the tool. In 2012, Paul and Elder presented their framework as a 'system for intellectual intervention [...] that allows us to take rational command of our cognitive processes so we may rationally determine what to accept and what to reject' - the team drew on this framework and expanded upon it to support critical evaluation of AI-generated text.

This project examined the affordances of digital media in supporting students' investigation of troublesome knowledge. By its very nature, digital media occupies a ‘third space’ – crossing temporal and physical thresholds. In this space, troublesome knowledge can be visited and revisited at intervals allowing students to bring new insight and make fresh connections throughout their learning journey. Digital media can provide a window on otherwise inaccessible places. New ways of ‘knowing’ can be created when threshold concepts are presented in multiple formats, and knowledge can be shared across disciplines or even communities, providing fresh perspectives on accepted norms. By taking an interdisciplinary approach in this project, we explored what troublesome knowledge means to a diverse group of students and staff and design digital media solutions informed by multiple perspectives.

• On Friday 2 June 2023, Edwina Jones, Nicola Knowles and Lauren Ketteridge presented at the UK & Ireland Engineering Education Research Network Annual Conference (EERN 2023; hosted by WMG). Their paper and presentation slides, entitled 'How can digital media enhance students' mastery of threshold concepts?', examined whether interactive or immersive digital content can extend classroom teaching, particularly in relation to threshold concepts which may be liminal, troublesome, integrative or transformative.

Five international undergraduate students who have come to study at Warwick in the last four years, from different disciplines and countries and speaking different languages, worked with their international peers to collect information on student experiences which demonstrated:

• Examples of good pedagogical practice used by learners to deal with the difficulties they face with various aspects of academic study;
• Examples of good pedagogical practice used by their lecturers to support their engagement in learning;
• Suggestions learners have of pedagogical practices teachers could use to support them in their study.

This project proposed the development of student co-created learning resources to promote and develop individual student and peer-to-peer self-care skills and wellbeing. Building on a recently completed WIHEA-funded project to generate educator guidance for trauma-informed pedagogies (1) and drawing on established sector leading-practice of project partners from Harvard Medical School (2) and acknowledging the prevalence of trauma and other mental health difficulties in current, post-pandemic student populations, the team embedded trauma-informed perspectives in developing self-care learning resources.

The Internationalisation of the Curriculum project asked how we can create a truly inclusive global curriculum across disciplines within our pedagogical design and development. While a great deal of important work at Warwick has focussed on how we can internationalise our pedagogies, decolonise our institutions, and create inclusive learning environments, less attention has been given to efforts to create a truly international and globally inclusive curriculum. This co-creative project combined rigorous pedagogical research, primary data collection across the region, and careful critical analysis to produce academic and other outputs that aim to transform curricula at Warwick and beyond across all disciplines.

The Global South Literary Festival celebrates peripheral voices and their stories of joy, struggle, success, survival and diaspora. The Festival aimed to attract writers, artists and thinkers based in and beyond Warwick and offer a platform for constructive cross-disciplinary discussions, where language and the arts play the crucial role of (re-)signifying difference and solidarity. Building on the Global South Initiative’s extensive network of academics, students and artists in the UK and abroad, from January ‘23 until June ‘23, the project ran a number of events to foreground Global South narratives.

This project aimed to bring staff and students with an expertise in design thinking from across the HE sector together to develop a shared language and knowledge around learner experience design. This community of practice supported the design and development of a toolkit to support staff and students involved in gathering learner experiences and co-creating new learner opportunities. Through a series of events, including a symposium and monthly meetings, we provided an opportunity for colleagues to come together to share experiences, thoughts, and opportunities for collaboration.

The project has created a sustainable community of practice and opened up collaborations between colleagues who participated in the project.

A deck of cards has been designed and prototyped to provide a resource for staff and students beyond the project to consider design thinking approaches, reflect upon their practice and gain some top tips. This resource continues to evolve and will be shared with the wider HE community.

The team has also developed a number of resources, including a community of practice on LinkedIn and a podcast series by the student officers, which documented their experiences of this project.

The work of the team led to the collaborative Designing Together project, which won a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence in 2024.

This project built on the work of the Teaching Recognition and Reward Learning Circle and the 2021 WIHEA Masterclass celebrating everyday excellence in teaching and learning.

A short survey was sent to UG and PGT students from a range of departments on what excellence means to them: the survey data is available here.

The results guided the development of semi-structured questions that were posed in two follow-up student focus groups; these questions were co-created with students, who facilitated the focus groups to encourage open discussion. The focus group data is available here.

Curriculum design is often owned by academic staff with student feedback relegated to module evaluations. However, genuine engagement must embed student voices in all aspects of modular design. At the same time, interdisciplinary modules offered in joint degree programmes present unique challenges in combining perspectives with different ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations. To address both dimensions, students in this project co-created all aspects of the curriculum for a joint degree module in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). In two groups, students, together with academic members of staff from the constituent departments, designed the module’s topics, reading list, assessment methods, guest lecturers, and discussed broader questions of curriculum design for interdisciplinary modules.

• The project created a core curriculum for an Honours level interdisciplinary module for the PPE joint degree - PH255 PPE: Interdisciplinary Topics - which will be offered to students from the 2023/24 academic year onwards.
• Various resources were developed that enable the outcomes of the project to be embedded and sustained in the university and their broader dissemination. The team developed a handbook on student co-creation of joint degree modules which will be shared with other joint degree programmes in the Faculty of Social Sciences, especially “Economics, Psychology and Philosophy” and “Politics Philosophy, and Law” which share many similarities with PPE.

Recent research at the University of Warwick, King's College London and the University of York has shown that disabled students report that their non-disabled student peers and academic staff often hold misperceptions and have a poor understanding of disability. For these reasons, this project co-created a short flexible, open-access disability learning programme for students and staff at these universities to help raise awareness and challenge misperceptions about the lived experience of disabled students. This programme's aims, content, and delivery were co-designed with disabled students lived experiences and student researchers.

Students have reported that when in small group sessions, facilitators did not always intervene when either microaggressions occurred or cultural explanations were requested of students. The students have raised that they then have an added burden of feeling the need to manage the situation themselves, an action which may be impacting their learning. This project explored the concerns of facilitators and barriers to action, followed by the development of a student-devised training package using virtual reality to help facilitators understand the impact on students and support their development in this area.

• The team developed a series of VR videos with an accompanying workshop, which is available here.
• They are building on this to roll out a face-to-face training session, which will be led by students, and a self-guided Moodle course; this has already been embedded with WMS case-based learning training.

Building on the success of the WIHEA funded “Warwick Sustainability Challenge (WSUsC): a Curriculum-Campus-Community approach to sustainable teaching and learning”, this project sought continuation and dissemination funding support.

• The project led to a third iteration in 2023/24.

Dr Leda Mirbahai (Warwick Medical School) and Dr Isabel Fischer (Warwick Business School), co-leads for the WIHEA Diverse Assessment Learning Circle, received WIHEA funding to undertake a project to explore the views and experience of students and staff of diverse assessments and to involve students in shaping the future of assessments.

• This poster, created by Molly Fowler, summarises the key findings of the project.
• In addition, you can read Molly’s blog on her reflection of the project outputs as well as Leda’s blog on inclusive assessments.

The main objective of this project was to create a leadership resource for those that teach or support student learning to build confidence, knowledge and skills to use ‘Active Bystander’ principles to address unacceptable behaviour in the teaching space and create a safe, engaged, inclusive learning experience.

• The resource will be embedded initially within the suite of teaching training for PGRs offered by the Academic Development Centre (ADC). It will sit under the APP:PGR umbrella as part of Theme 2: Inclusive learning and teaching, and be delivered to several cohorts per year in the programme's second workshop.

• The team ran a workshop, ‘Active Bystanders in the Teaching Space’, on Friday 21 April.

The project team worked with students to co-create interactive and engaging mathematics e-assessments using the STACK package (on MoodleX), Desmos and Javascript for Year 1 Mathematics students (starting 2022/23). These electronic tools were used to create formative and summative quizzes that are visually engaging and highly interactive to replace traditional pen-and-paper mathematics assessments, bringing maths equations and theorems to life through 3D visualisation and interactive graphics. The modules for focus were the new modules MA144 Methods of Mathematical Modelling II and MA145 Mathematical Methods and Modelling II.

• Over five weeks, 11 sets of (mostly summative) quizzes were co-created on MoodleX in collaboration with two interns. Four student beta testers were involved in the user-feedback process (testing and minor edits are still on-going on a casual basis).

• The interns also produced some vlogs, which demonstrated their involvement in the development process and how their resources can be used for assessment purposes.

Student research is a key strategic priority for the University, with many opportunities for students to engage both within and outside the curriculum. Student feedback indicates the key role of departments (as opposed to support delivered centrally) in building confidence in students to undertake research and alerting them to funding and dissemination opportunities. With this in mind, this project aimed to create a leadership resource to build confidence, knowledge and skills to enable academics to support student research across the UG and PGT spectrum, access appropriate opportunities and understand the distinctive features of supervising those new to research. This resource is linked to existing resources where possible, and was co-created with students to ensure that addressing student needs and expectations around research supervision is interwoven with the creation of each part of the resource and its guidance.

• The resource is available here.

Feedback is essential to the development and growth of a student. Good feedback motivates students to engage in learning. However, the large cohort enrolled in many undergraduate courses can make it difficult for academics to provide detailed, useful and sufficient timely feedback to students. The project aimed to create a software tool that improves the feedback that is provided to students without an adverse effect on staff workload.

The aim of the project was to provide a space through which to record, collate and disseminate information about digital pedagogy in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick, building on the success of the previous year's iteration.

• The Digital Pedagogies Library both showcased the excellent practice work occurring across the Faculty of Arts and beyond in the field of digital pedagogy, and inspired broader engagement and innovation within the digital sphere. It continues to grow and collate resources.

This project aimed to develop ways of empowering student voice(s) at the University in relation to academic disciplines and interdisciplinary research fields. This was put into practice by identifying pedagogies and approaches which enable students to have greater ownership and personal engagement with their area of academic study.

• The project set up a survey and developed a draft literature review, both of which were concerned with exploring the concept of student voice beyond engagement with formal quality mechanisms in order to understand how students connected their own views and experiences to their learning.

• The project offered spaces for student participation in public engagement, demonstrating the importance of public engagement for student experience and enhancing learning outcomes - one such example is a podcast in which the team discussed the project and their understanding of the value of student voice: https://open.spotify.com/episode/21L040dIWRE6weTyjBbJbD?si=gQZPnDW2TWenPF0oRg7u7Q

• The findings were presented at a dissemination event to colleagues from Warwick and wider UK HE

As we look ahead to a future that is likely to include more widespread integration of blended learning elements into ‘conventional’ HE teaching, it is important to understand how students are differentially affected by learning in a blended environment and encountering online assessment methods which might be unfamiliar to them. The project investigated students’ development of assessment literacy and self-efficacy on blended learning modules.

Though traditional induction activities engage many students, there is a concern about engagement that these activities don’t reach. To help solve this issue, our vision was to create an online gamified learning environment based on the ‘treasure hunt’ and ‘escape room’ pedagogies. In this environment, students can learn and apply a range of Warwick Core Skills, all while virtually experiencing the campus and being exposed to the whole range of academic offerings. The pilot phase began at the Library (relevant to students from all subjects) and delivered a storyboard and script for an online treasure hunt to engage students with the Library’s vast array of learning services. From the pilot phase’s success, we were able to validate the merit behind this concept for the overall scalability across all departments.

• The final outcome was a virtual treasure hunt challenge proof-of-concept that existing and new students are able to engage with in a fun, challenging and competitive way to solve their learning problems with awareness of the solutions that the Library can offer. Mozilla Hubs has shut down, so the proof-of-concept demo is no longer available, but screenshots are available here.

The Midlands Racial Equality in Medicine Network (MREM) aimed to build connections between regional medical schools to provide both staff and students with a platform to share upcoming initiatives, disseminating research and creating joint ventures related to increasing attainment and graduate outcomes among ethnic minority medical students and increasing racial equality in medicine.

• The Network has held two conferences: at Warwick Medical School in February 2022; and at the University of Leicester in March 2023.
• The Network and its work was featured in a documentary entitled 'Racism in the NHS'.
• The Network set up a social media account to support their activities and public engagement.

A major challenge facing the University and other English-language HE providers is insufficient support for helping international foundation and pre-masters students to achieve success when transitioning into an English language HEI. Furthermore, there is a lack of research on the transition into foundation and pre-master's. The project co-authored (between students and staff at the University of Warwick, the University of Sussex, Solent University, Arden University in Berlin, and the Active Learning Network [ALN]) an online induction resource and publication to support the foundation and pre-master's international to transition to UK universities.

• The students produced a selection of induction resources in English, Russian and Chinese, which were shared with students on the International Foundation Year Programme in WFS and undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Education Studies department. They were also disseminated with the ALN and at partner institutions, and attracted wider interest from other higher education bodies both in the UK and abroad.

The seminar, when established with the right atmosphere and culture, can be a space that is crucial in helping students gain confidence in expressing themselves and become more comfortable in their academic growth. Seeing the importance of this, this project is seeking to find the definition of what a seminar is. This will be by using both staff and student experiences to understand the expectations and realities of seminars, before pulling together similarities and differences to reach an effective conclusion - creating a route through which we can make seminars more inclusive, productive and engaging. The project was centred around developing a six-part research podcast, covering both the opinions of students and staff on the seminar experience.

• The project conducted a survey of students across the university, gathering 45 responses from a selection of departments. From this, it was possible to determine the factors that made a seminar engaging or not, through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data, addressing challenges such as room set-up, inclusivity, experience of the tutor and the relevance of the seminar to the module.
• Building on this, the team then explored the definition of a seminar in a number of podcast episodes:
• E1: The Seminar Project - Year 1 reflections with Maureen Onwunali
• E2: The Seminar Project - Year 2 reflections with Jessica Anderson (ft. Maureen Onwunali)
• E3: The Seminar Project - Year 3 reflections with Diane Danquah and Nosa Charles-Novia
• The team also produced a report, summarising the project and its main findings.

Peer-to-peer support (e.g. societies, schemes embedded in academic departments, student services) plays a vital role in equipping everyone at the University to implement inclusive education. It does so by forging a sense of belonging and community for all students, and for this reason, training and support for mentors are crucial. The aim of this project was to engage with colleagues across the institution to identify training support needs, gaps in provision, and instances of replicable good practice.

• The following pages of guidance, advice and resources were written and complied by a team of student Project Officers: Viktoria Erdei-Szabo, Jessica Noble, Evelin Sanderson-Nichols, and Meifang Zhuo. They were informed by a series of focus group sessions conducted by the project team with key stakeholders working in various academic departments, professional services, and student associations in the University of Warwick:
• Peer Mentoring: The Basics

• Pairing-Up Guide and Resources
• Training for Peer Mentoring
• Signposting and Opportunities
• The work also informed the practices of the Peer Mentoring Learning Circle, on its path to becoming a Warwick-wide network.

This project has brought together teaching and learning communities at UCB and Warwick to share practice in inclusive education, with a specific focus on co-creation between staff and students. Through a series of hybrid workshops, staff and student co-creators have been invited to learn from different approaches to inclusion through practical teaching and co-curricular activities.

The project aimed to improve disabled student outcomes and experiences at the University by understanding the barriers that they encounter in their student experience, as well as exploring the approaches staff use to support neurodivergent students in their learning and wider experiences.

As part of the results, there were recommendations for different areas of the University’s teaching and learning experience. This included:

• Recommendations for Personal Tutoring (including areas for training for personal tutors and the presence of contacts that are aware of issues around disability within departments to enhance inclusive personal tutoring practices at Warwick)
• Recommendations at a Department level (including considerations for ensuring that diverse student voices are consulted through co-production and feedback mechanisms and better communication with disability services)
• Recommendations for Learning and Teaching (including blended learning approaches where appropriate and providing training on accessibility design of educational material and learning spaces)

The ‘inclusive practice learning and teaching recipes’ (including infographics and pen portraits of neurodivergent students) have been shared on the Neurodiversity Toolkit, which contains a bank of resources to support inclusive practices, as well as exemplars and case studies depicting good practice.

The objective of this project was to provide a whole-higher education approach to sustainability, linking the teaching and learning provision (Curriculum), to values and ways of working and studying on Campus, and the local Community by engaging with local people and partners. This project aimed to raise the profile of the importance of education for sustainable development, using an interdisciplinary approach and co-creation as important areas of student focus and engagement.

Brought to the Warwick Community by the WIHEA ESD learning circle, the Challenge saw staff and students co-creating ideas to tackle a real environmental challenge in Coventry, using a more holistic approach to sustainability in HE. The Challenge engaged around 70 participants who actively participated in two three-hour workshops, an optional drop-in session with experts in the area, and the competition initiative.

This project aimed to start a cross institutional dialogue about employability through a co-creation Warwick Employability Challenge. Warwick Innovation Fellows delivered a series of design thinking workshops during Warwick Enterprise Summer Innovation Programme 2021, inviting teams from across the University to challenge themselves and existing representations of employability.

• Team submissions from across Warwick, on the theme of reimagining employability
• An article on employability for the British Journal of Guidance & Counselling

This project aimed to help academics at the university to support neurodivergent students, improve their academic learning experience and student outcomes. The project created a library of inclusive practice exemplars collected from the staff community and supported by testimonies from neurodivergent students. It is hoped that this will reduce the disparity of students' experience in the future.

• Neurodiversity Toolkit
• The work also informed the practices and the outputs of the Neurodiversity and the Student Experience Learning Circle

This project, aimed at Engineering Apprentices, created valuable resources for students to enhance both their professional skills as well as their learning skills and help them better navigate the apprentice programme.

• The funding helped support the co-creation of the pilot phase for MOBIUS

The aim of the project was to provide a space through which to record, collate and disseminate information about digital pedagogy in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick.

• The Digital Pedagogies Library both showcased the excellent practice work occurring across the Faculty of Arts and beyond in the field of digital pedagogy, and inspired broader engagement and innovation within the digital sphere. It continues to grow and collate resources.

Starting with the idea of a Writing Circle, the project team commissioned writer, poet and educator George Ttoouli to design and try out a series of writing resources intended to prompt reflection on workplace wellbeing.

• Writing resources by George Ttoouli

• Findings were presented to the Staff Wellbeing Strategy Group to inform the development and delivery of the University Warwick of Wellbeing Strategy (2020-2024) priorities and contribute to evidence for the THRIVE Workforce Wellbeing Charter.

The main aim of the project was to create an online Interdisciplinary Staff Hub that supports educators in designing and delivering interdisciplinary teaching and learning, from activities to assessment.

The co-created Learning from Crisis project explored what might be learned and embedded from the experience of and responses to Covid-19 in relation to teaching and learning at Warwick.

• The project established a new Learning Circle in WIHEA, which met fortnightly after March 2021, which led to community building and the opportunity to share conversations and develop understanding over time.

This podcast project aimed to listen-in to conversations about blended learning. Our virtual 'listening room' brought together both students and staff, to reflect upon, discuss, and learn from the experiences of an extraordinary year to move to a place of understanding and of partnership.

• Listening@Warwick podcasts

This project was about the creation of a unique community of practice space for postgraduates who teach, for the sharing of pedagogy and practice, mentorship and a resource for teaching in the digital era

• Initial project led to the creation of the Warwick Postgraduate Teaching Community (PTC)
• The PTC publishes the Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice
• Winners of a 2024 CATE

This action research project aimed to explore the BAME student experience on three PGT professional programmes in WMS, CLL and CTE, in the contexts of both the awarding gap and their respective professional contexts.

This project aimed at exploring what co-creation curriculum and projects are taking place at the University of Warwick. It mapped co-creation activities across the University in order to understand, support, promote and publicise its benefits.

• As a result of this project, an article was written and published in RAISE: Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal

This project facilitated the development of bridging content for 2020/21 second-year students in 13 departments across Warwick.

This project linked students and staff across the SEM Faculty with the aim of improving the delivery of practical subjects online.

This project aimed at enhancing the culture component of Language Culture modules for SMLC finalists.

This project aimed to undertake an institutional review of existing peer-to-peer support schemes across all departments with a view to identifying aspects of good practice whilst highlighting areas for attention and improvement.

This project to improve the student experience of digital assessment methods across the Faculty of Arts has resulted in co-produced resources for staff and students that offer guidance on the use of digital assessment in the curriculum and the support offered beyond.

• The project generated a co-created bank of resources on digital assessment

This project was co-developed by students and teachers in order to share practice and support Warwick's community to embed and sustain wellbeing in the curriculum when planning modules, courses and assessments.

• The main output was the Library itself, an extensive database of information boasting a wealth of resources and information on wellbeing more generally
• The project informed the practices of the Wellbeing Pedagogies Learning Circle
• It also informed the development and delivery of the

  Wellbeing Strategy 2020/2024

This project aimed to integrate debating within teaching and learning across the University and embed it within the Warwick student experience, and to help students develop key employability skills, such as negotiating and influencing, commercial awareness, and professional communication.

This ‘Triple Strands’ project sought to support three of the four then-new Education Strategy strands – Student Research, Internationalisation, and Interdisciplinarity – by communicating Warwick’s distinctive offering through departmental web-pages and centralised hubs.

• A complete project report was written, with several key recommendations being suggested, including the creation of a project steering group to continue this approach and further support the embedding of the three strands of the Education Strategy.
• Departmental web-pages on Internationalisation and Interdisciplinarity were piloted in 14 departments representing all three Faculties, with the Project Officer also working to help those departments who had not yet set up their own Student Research web-pages. By the end of the pilot, five departments had managed to complete their departmental pages using the templates provided as an initial starting point.

This project sought to investigate how teaching staff embed international, intercultural and global perspectives in the curriculum across disciplines at the module level, and to achieve an understanding of how teaching staff conceptualise ‘internationalisation’ in the learning domain.

• Internationalisation of the curriculum is closely associated with helping students understand the interconnectedness between the global and the local, as well as understanding different cultural understandings of subject matter.
• This project has resulted in a 27,000-word project report containing detailed case studies of internationalisation of the curriculum across the three Faculties at the university.

• It then supported a Warwick-Monash Alliance project on internationalisation aiming to produce resources for academic staff.

A comparison of assessment criteria and methods for scoring individual contribution to group projects and evaluation of reliability and fairness of peer review when compared with expert observation of group work.

The Anti-Racist Pedagogy learning circle received WIHEA project funding for two events: a planning day on 25 June 2019 to develop Guidance on Embedding Anti-racist Pedagogy in Teaching and Learning at Warwick and a two day, event in Cambridge to develop the Anti-racist Training Programme.

This project presented Warwick’s interdisciplinarity nature to new students through sessions provided during Welcome Week (WW), to highlight all that Warwick has to offer, and broadened awareness of the value of interdisciplinarity perspectives.

• The team devised a creative programme of activities throughout Welcome Week.
• These included a series of IATL module taster sessions entitled ‘Widening Your Horizons’ on topics such as Wellbeing, Imagination and Design Thinking; a film screening of Wall-E followed by an interdisciplinary panel of Warwick experts; and a workshop on making the perfect sandwich with interdisciplinary and cultural perspectives on food.
• The events reached around 170 students, and were repeated the following year given their success.

This project enhanced the student experience by exploring the wider professional context in which degrees operate, and looked to understand how to recognise better the relationship between undergraduate studies and professional practice.

• Students broadly felt themselves to be well-prepared for practice, although a few were unsure. The findings for alumni and employers were more mixed.

• The project contributed to reviews of teaching in WMG and School of Engineering which have resulted in more authentic modes of teaching and learning (project based learning) and more focus on supporting students In becoming ‘reflective practitioners’.

This project helped students make the transition to university-level study, recognising the value and importance of engaging in independent research, and worked to encourage students to start carrying out their own research from their first assignments of their degree.

• A variety of themes were discussed in four student workshops (run in May and June 2018), including the transition from school to university (imposter syndrome and a lack of preparation), approaches to research, moving from first year to honours and the benefits of research (both academic and personal fulfilment).
• Three videos were created by the students from these workshop discussions: ‘Starting your research journey’, ‘Top tips for first year research’ and ‘Finding your path through honours level research’.
• The project team presented a report on their work at the 2019 Warwick Education Conference.

This project sought to improve the student induction experience and prepare students for their academic studies through the development of pre-arrival e-learning resources, and enhance student engagement before arrival at university.

• The team co-developed and launched a Moodle course on August 2019, and expanded it based upon learning analytics.
• The findings were presented at the Advance HE conference in July 2020.
• The results and impact of the project were published in a paper in the Journal of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.

This project sought to collate the experiences of students who have spent or are spending time abroad in the course of their degree programme, with the particular aim of examining how these students have managed their wellbeing abroad and how they have been supported in terms of their wellbeing by the institution.

• The sampled students provided recommendations which were incorporated into departmental Study Abroad handbooks/pre-departure meetings.

• A detailed final project report was written, presenting the context of Study Abroad programmes and exploring the key findings of the project.

• Findings were additionally presented at the Warwick Education Conference in May 2019.

The Warwick Secret Challenge was an interdisciplinary brainstorming workshop. Drawing on the work of innovative thinkers and a passion for design thinking, they developed a creative, accessible, and fun programme.

• 'Warwick Secret Challenge: Design thinking for re-imagining student engagement' in Transforming Higher Education with Human-Centred Design (2024)

The project explored the opportunities presented by social media platforms to support innovative teaching and learning by bringing together a group of Chinese students to work collaboratively with academic and support staff to identify the possibilities and challenges to using social media for this purpose.

The aim of this project was to use video recorded peer support as a tool to support mature students in their engagement with University life.

This project aimed to engage a team of student researchers with the literature around inclusivity and enable them to work with students and staff to develop a greater understanding of what inclusivity means in different disciplinary contexts.

This project, which was conceived as a direct result of engagement in the HEA STEM 2018 Conference in Newcastle, aimed to examine whether individual exam feedback supports learning gain and the student experience. The project aimed to provide proof of concept for a semi-automated model for individual examination feedback and quantification of the logistics of such provision.

Following on from prior WIHEA funded projects on Student Research and directly supporting the institutional Education Strategy, this project sought to investigate the student experience of internationalisation at Warwick and make it more accessible for students.

This project built on the work of a prior WIHEA Student Research project showcasing, celebrating and building approaches for engaging staff and students in Warwick’s many interdisciplinary activities.

As part of the Institutional Review of Undergraduate Research Opportunities, the aim was to provide departments with the opportunity to further reflect on the undergraduate research opportunities established and promoted within their departments and increase the level of communication with students regarding such opportunities.

This project piloted an achievement badging scheme aimed at increasing students’ awareness of the skills they develop through small tasks and lab experiments in three chemistry modules.

The principal aim of this project was to allow departments to develop a clear view of the student and recent graduate perspective on both the discipline and the discipline-specific student experience. By combining this with the perspectives of employers and staff, a multi-faceted understanding was generated of the professional values and behaviours associated with the discipline.

The MAP project aimed to improve the student experience by promoting a more diverse range of assessment methods across the University. This was achieved by creating an online toolkit which helps staff make pedagogically-informed choices, and guide them through the assessment design process.

The project was a collaboration between Library staff and students and academic colleagues from English and the School for Modern Languages and Culture. Working with students, the team developed and produced peer-support videos to help students get started with independent research at university.

An online decision-making tool and guidance resource was developed to aid in the design of effective assessment, marking and feedback which is aligned to learning outcomes and encourages the development of employability skills.

In this project, two departments with a strong commitment to professionalism (Warwick Medical School and the Centre for Teacher Education) collaborated to produce interactive and thought-provoking educational material relating to professional behaviours. It built on Warwick’s experience of interdisciplinarity and expands this to interprofessional learning.

A project to develop the institutional understanding of what Warwick students think about learning analytics and how those analytics might be used to support an individual student’s learning journey and engagement. Initial surprising findings supported the design of Warwick’s student information systems.