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Student Champions investigation - Higher Education Academy project

This page details past work and remains available as an archive. For information on the current status of this work, please contact academictech at warwick dot ac dot uk.

These pages present work done as part of a HEA funded project in Spring 2015. For information on the development of Warwick's Student Champion schemes, including learning & teaching champions and digichamps, see the Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA) web site.

Final report: O’Toole, Robert (2016) Student Champions: A competency framework, process model and developmental approach for engaging students in the enhancement of learning, teaching and the student experience in higher education. Higher Education Academy.

Student Champions are great! In the resource constrained and time limited world of the university, having an extra-eager student with spare energy, time and knowledge to give is a wonderful thing. In return, being a champion provides the student with rare opportunities to work on design and development projects with experienced people using professional methods. This can lead to well rewarded work opportunities and, for enterprising students, provides a pathway to growing their own digital innovation business.

What Student Champions can enable

Perhaps most importantly for the University in the long term, Student Champion schemes develop a more sophisticated understanding of teaching quality - with students better able to assess and feedback on teaching and the student experience. We are working with students and support services to design and implement a Student Champions scheme at Warwick, building upon the pioneering work done by the Arts E-Squad, Social Sciences FLAG Team and the Life Sciences Digichamps. We want to make something that is, in the words of the students...

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Between June and August 2015 we completed a project funded by the Higher Education Academy to define a competency framework, process model and developmental approach for engaging students in the enhancement of learning, teaching and the student experience in Higher Education. We believe that Student Champions can be more than just helpful, they can help transform the University, enhancing all aspects of learning, teaching and the student experience.

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This is a multi-agency initiative bringing together IT Services, LDC, the Library, Student Careers and Skills, IATL, the Students' Union, the Teaching Quality office and CLL. We are funding two pilot SC teams - in Classics and Life Sciences (continuing the existing Digichamps scheme). 18 students took part in a co-design workshop in July to help us with the project. We have now developed a proposal describing how we would like to develop this into a permanent scheme. We hope to see this incorporated into the work of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy.

Champions