SACACA Project Progress

Started by Dr Mark Gatenby and Dr Lisa Harris, the Students As Creators And Change Agents Programme (SACACA, using twitter with #SBSCoCreate) is now entering it’s third year at the University of Southampton. Although the members of the programme have changed, and the aims diversified, co-creation has remained at the core of what the group have been doing. Working with a wide range of students allows for an inter-disciplinary approach to tackling obstacles, and developing innovative new materials.

Team meeting, with Bartosz on Skype :-)
Team meeting

One of the first aims of the project was to create a new suite of First Year Undergraduate modules that would form a core of all business programmes at the University. The aim when developing these was to offer a broad education organised around a liberal interest in ideas, along with contemporary relevance, to help students to understand the impact that business has on their lives. The new modules were designed to support six distinctive perspectives on business: analytics, management, history, philosophy, entrepreneurship, innovation. Delivering the new modules involves collaboration across a number of Faculties as part of a wider strategy to embed the Business School more strongly in the intellectual life of the university. The focus during the co-creation stage of the project was on four new modules:

The modules were developed by Student Digital Champions (Digichamps) Olja Rastic-Dulborough and Tim O’Riordan acted as mentors to the undergraduate team of Bartosz Paszcza (Physics), Charlie Mason (Politics and International Relations), Tim Mitchell (Business School) and postgraduate student Sylvian Patrick (Business School), as well as supporting academics from the Business School. The team worked to design modules embracing technology, and lessons learnt from other courses across the University, most notably Dr Lisa Harris’ award-winning Curriculum Innovation module Living and Working on the Web.

The modules ran for the first time during the academic year 2015-2016, in Semester 1 and the role of the group has evolved to reflect that. Part of the aim of the group now, and over the Summer months is to review the impact and student feedback of these modules, taking student input as the main driver of change. One of the most exciting outcome was the MANG1020 module receiving an award recognizing excellent use of Virtual Learning Environments from the Institute for Learning Innovation and Development at the University of Southampton.

However, the group has also evolved beyond just the design of these modules, and into other areas. These areas are summarised below:

  • Fostering a Digital Learning Environment, building on the work of Pintrest and Blackboard innovation in the modules, by allowing Students to run this blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook page
  • Increasing Student Engagement in the wider Business School, by working with students to organise field trips and guest speakers
  • Helping to develop the transition of new students into the Business School, by using  student-created and designed content to bring everyone to common level in key academic skills before induction week
  • Working with the academics and staff in the faculty to offer feedback and suggestions for the overall of assessment and feedback practises, whilst introducing new forms of feedback methods across the school
  • Exploring student feedback and ideas regarding Self-Managed Learning, a practise used in both modules MANG1020 and MANG1018.
  • To present our experiences of working on this project at various conferences, at a national and international level.

With the expansion of the aims and roles of the Students As Creators Project, an expansion of those involved has also been undertaken. The staff members involved the project are included below:

  • Dr Lisa Harris
  • Dr Mark Gatenby
  • Dr Stefan Cantore
  • Stefanos Manrangos
  • Emma Lester

There are also now more students involved than ever before, which is incredibly important for the projects success, given the scope. Their names are included below:

  • Zak Rakrouki
  • Amy Morgan
  • Tom Rowledge
  • Tom Davidson
  • Andreas Sabia
  • Sam Phelps
  • Calvin Vere-White
  • Yan Pineda
  • Jessica Hamilton

The group are always on the lookout for new members, whether they wish to focus on a specific area, write for the blog, or just find out more about the project.

As outlined above, one of the most important current roles of the project is to present our experiences thus far at conferences. There is a great deal of research that has gone into the project from the academics involved, and if you wish to find out out this please get in contact with them, or attend a presentation at our next conference. Summarised below are the conferences we have attended, and any materials associated with them:

Possible future attendances at:

We have also produced a selection of posters that illustrate our work, and these are included here:

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All latest updates regarding the project in general will be published on the blog, and on this page below:

Finally, a little gallery is provided below, that we hope captures some of our adventures! You can also look at our Pinterest Board!

 

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