Friday, October 26th 2018 PSF

This workshop examines the role of participation in higher education in the context of sustainable development and social learning. Using a highly interactive "backcasting" methodology, students and researchers are invited to develop visions of higher education futures that will subsequently be used to critically assess present practice. Participants will examine the potential of learner-led education and active student participation as pathways for transforming learning cultures.

The complexity and uncertainty inherent in contemporary sustainability challenges leads to the coexistence of multiple values and problem framings. Within the context of higher education, this calls for a questioning of power relations in knowledge production, and whose participation and perspectives are valued and why. In pursuit of enhancing a culture for learning, learner-led educational contexts challenge these dynamics. The fields of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Environmental Education (EE) raise the need for a culture for learning where students play a more active and decisive role than they are traditionally assigned. This invites universities and educators to rethink their approaches to research and education, and requires changes in culture, teaching methods, and curricula within higher education.

While examples of students and faculty working as partners in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning are becoming more frequent, the arena of learner-led inquiry into teaching and learning practices in higher education is rarer. It has been noted that students have perspectives that are valuable and different from that of faculty, and which benefits SoTL practice. SoTL learner-led ESD or EE thus have shared implications for the conference theme, a culture for learning, where we argue for a serious consideration of how learner-led inquiry can and should reshape education cultures.

This workshop brings together students and researchers to explore this topic using a "backcasting" approach. This approach uses visions of the future as a tool to critically reflect on the present. After a brief introduction, participants will be invited to discuss desired futures when it comes to learning and knowledge in the mid-21st century. We will then discuss challenges and opportunities in the present and to explore pathways to these visions of future higher education.

What happens when we play with classroom space? How does built pedagogy affect teaching and learning? What is it like to teach in a yurt rather than a traditional classroom? This sharing session centers on Coast Mountain College's ‘Pebble Project’, the idea that doing one thing different can have a ripple effect of change. Faculty set out to explore ‘round’ teaching, in the yurt classroom lab, as our ‘one thing different’. Did it change our teaching? The learning? Was it any different than 'circle' teaching?

Faculty pursued this scholarly inquiry in a community of practice, with 8 faculty participating, representing the disciplines of biology, trades (automotive), geography, early childhood care and education, business, and geoscience. These faculty all taught one semester course in the yurt to create answers as to how space affects teaching and learning. As part of our efforts to answer this question, we documented our answers and gathered regularly to share insights with one another.

Come hear our stories of how ‘built pedagogy’ contributed to teaching and learning and explore how you can play with space and shape in your own classrooms. This session will address both process (‘round’ teaching) and meta-process (scholarly inquiry within a community of practice). Instructors and faculty developers will take away valuable lessons from both and be provided with opportunity to question how this model of teaching and learning as well as scholarly inquiry and professional development could be implementable in their own institutions.

Supporting scholars who wish to engage in researching their own teaching can be challenging, requiring awareness of each scholars' unique disciplinary background and varying experience with SoTL. The very nature of SoTL activity often requires faculty to question and go beyond their familiar methodological and epistemological frameworks. To overcome this tension, with the goal of making SoTL accessible to a wider audience, institutions are continuously developing programs that aim at scaffolding and sustaining faculty engagement with SoTL within and across disciplines (Dobbins, 2008; Webb, Wong, Hubball, 2013). On the other hand, a call to engage students as partners in SoTL has emerged vocally in the SoTL landscape (e.g. Manor, Block-Schulman, Flannery, & Felten, 2010; Werder, Pope-Ruark, & Verwoord, 2016).

With this in mind, we identified the potential of expert graduate students (termed “SoTL Specialists”) to support faculty members as they engage with SoTL. This program identifies outstanding graduate students, provides ongoing SoTL training and professional development, and matches them with faculty members who seek support. The SoTL Seed was implemented at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2015, with the goal of supporting faculty as they embark in SoTL activity. SoTL Specialists are graduate students with diverse backgrounds and interests, mainly from the behavioural and educational sciences. They are positioned as experts and partners who help both novice and experienced faculty build capacity in SoTL. While each SoTL Specialist partners with faculty on specific projects, they are also at the core of an inclusive learning community of graduate students, where each member contributes and supports other members of the team from their own disciplines, areas of expertise, perspectives and skillsets. The team of students, with its diversity and internal cohesion, enriches the full spectrum of the SoTL projects we support and contributes to personal growth and wellbeing of its members.

Our presentation will highlight how this institutional program at a large research intensive university is impacting graduate students’ identities as researchers, scholars, and partners in SoTL, and also as members of an inclusive learning community. The SoTL Seed program is a unique example of how institutions can successfully support SoTL activity by building on the expertise, commitment and diverse perspectives of their own students.

After getting to know our team members’ experiences with SoTL, participants in this session will be inspired to discuss whether our program could inform the implementation of similar support strategies at their own institutions.

In this session, we will present the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research we are conducting in the context of a course we are offering for graduate students. The course is focused on developing students’ statistical consulting skills and experience to support faculty conducting their own SoTL research. Our research question investigates whether the course practicum benefited students above and beyond the in-class experiential components. These experiential components consisted of role playing and simulation of consultation sessions. The aim of these experiential exercises was to help prepare students for their practicum, which required them to provide one-on-one statistical support for faculty. Thus, both the faculty and students benefited from these interactions: faculty benefited by learning about statistics from the graduate students, whereas the graduate students benefited by gaining valuable statistical consulting experience. In this way, we are fostering a synergistic culture of learning.

We have collected qualitative data in the abovementioned course to assess the impact of role-playing, simulation and a consulting practicum on students’ confidence in their ability to provide statistical support. Past research has shown that both knowledge, and confidence in that knowledge, are critical for people to act quickly, confidently and reliably in any situation, including on-the-job (Hunt, 2003). Students reflections (written and verbal via interview) on the use of simulation and role-playing techniques were assessed for common themes speaking to the perceived effectiveness of these techniques to prepare them for future consulting. Additionally, students were asked to provide reflective feedback (written and verbal via interview) on the impact their practicum experience had on their potential future consulting work. These data were also analyzed for common themes and compared to themes extracted from the simulation and role playing data. We specifically focused on whether the practicums offered any added value above and beyond the simulations and role-playing. This work is currently in progress and the findings will help refine the design of the future offerings of this course, which in turn will impact the experience of future cohorts of students and their faculty partners. In this way the results of the study will help shed light on how to foster and promote effective, synergistic student-faculty partnerships.

This study investigates the relationships between the clarity of the course, approaches to learning, and the tools used for learning. We based this study on Ramsden’s (1988) premise that learning is influenced by the context, and consists of three domains which are assessment (evaluation of what is learnt), curriculum (content and structure of what is learnt) and teaching (method of transmission of what is learnt). We focus the discussion of this paper on the curriculum and teaching.

When students learn, they can take a surface or deep level approach (Biggs, 1999) but students are also likely to adopt a combination of both approaches depending on the circumstances where the learning is happening. Previous studies have found that students who understand the purpose and value (Hulleman, 2007) of what they are studying will be more engaged and have shown to adopt a deep approach to learning (Floyd, Harrington & Santiago, 2009). Therefore, we believe that the clarity of the curriculum will affect the students’ approach to learning.

With the availability of online tools (e.g., video lectures, Learning Catalytics) and traditional learning approaches (e.g., lectures, tutorials, study groups), teachers can use these tools to aid their teaching and further engage their students in deeper learning. One of the gaps in the literature is the understanding of the relationship between the students’ learning approaches to the various teaching tools that are used in teaching.

Two questions that will be addressed in this study are:

1. What is the relationship between the clarity of a course outline (curriculum) and the approach student take in learning (deep vs. surface)?
2. How useful are the different types of teaching activities perceived for learning by deep and surface learners?

The background of this study are Year 1 students undertaking a foundational physics course in a public university in Singapore. A total of 151 responses were received but only 91 responses were usable after post processing. The revised two-factor study process questionnaire (SPQ-2F) (Biggs, Kember & Leong, 2001) was used to measure students’ learning approaches while the Learning Experience Inventory in Courses (LEI-C) (Wong & Thadani, 2014) was used to measure the clarity of students’ perception of the course. Respondents also rated using a Likert scale on the various learning and teaching approaches that the instructor used in the course how these tools helped them with their learning.

Addressing the reach of SoTL practices and influence, Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone (2011) state that in SoTL “the focus has shifted from the design of individual projects to collaborative work that can influence institutional change” (p. 125).

Addressing the reach of SoTL practices and influence, Hutchings, Huber and Ciccone (2011) state that in SoTL “the focus has shifted from the design of individual projects to collaborative work that can influence institutional change” (p. 125).

This paper gives an account of a SoTL project where the collaboration between an academic and an educational developer led to a more developed conception of workload and influenced institutional practices. It exemplifies work that has fostered development within the institutional culture. The intended outcome of the paper is to give an overview of the project’s findings and raise discussion among colleagues on how the knowledge gained could be applied in different higher education setting to enhance the scholarly practices

As promoted by the Bologna process, academics at the University are encouraged to use various educational tools. The Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) adheres to those requirements with various aids on learning outcomes, curriculum alignment, and calculation of student workload. Edda, being a “sincere” teacher (Gurung & Scwartz, 2011), made use of those tools when designing a new course. Despite having followed the recommendations given by the CTL in a scholarly way, students rated the workload in the course much higher than in other courses.

In cooperation with CTL, Edda decided to explore her students’ experiences of the workload. Building on previous research (Kember, 2004; Kyndt, Berghmans, Dochy & Bulckens, 2014) she used mixed methods and exploratory sequential design (Bryman, 2016) for her study.

Students kept an online diary, documenting their time spent on various course-work. This was followed by in-depth interviews with six students. The findings revealed the complexity of the workload concept. While students still experienced heavy workload, it was neither reflected in actual time spent on tasks nor was it necessarily experienced negatively by students. Rather, students’ conceptions of workload were influenced by other factors such as the structure and profile of the course, and their previous experience, expectations and future orientation.

The findings of the study contested the institutional idea of student workload presented in educational development discourse and required the CTL to critically examine the knowledge and skills presented.

The learning goal of the proposal is to raise discussion on student workload to further our understanding of the findings through participants’ collective reflection on the following question: What kind of “tools” could be applied in curriculum design to enhance students learning experience?

Assessment of teaching has become a flashpoint for heated debates and discussions on many campuses. As faculty at a large public research university in the United States, the presenters found themselves in a system that relied almost entirely on student evaluations of teaching, which are fraught with claims of bias (e.g., Boring, 2017). There has been institutional discussion about expanding assessment methods, but little progress, so the presenters took it upon themselves to explore course portfolios in an effort to effect institutional change from the bottom up (Bernstein, Burnett, Goodburn, & Savory, 2006). In this panel we provide an overview of the campus situation and reasoning for creating course portfolios. Then, three faculty members will share their varied approaches to constructing their portfolios, and what they gained from the process. Finally, we share progress toward creating institutional change.

As with most major research institutions in the United States, our university includes teaching in annual evaluations, promotion, and tenure decisions. The extent to which these teaching evaluations are weighted varies widely across departments and colleges, but there is a need and expectation for quality documentation. Historically, student evaluations have focused on two common questions, one about course quality and the other instructor quality. These two questions served as a primary means for evaluating and comparing faculty. That is changing. Because of proven biases (gender, course level, nationality, etc.) and inconsistent assessment, faculty have demanded a move away from these two common summative questions posed to all students, but replacements have struggled to take root. Some departments have adopted peer evaluation systems (Chism, 2007), with varied methods of implementation and levels of success. The large time investment to do this well and consistently seems to hinder wider adoption. Peer review can be for formative and/or summative evaluation, but motivation for formative assessment seems lacking, and quality of the review is critical for equitable summative evaluation. After a workshop by Dr. DeZure of Michigan State University, course portfolios surfaced as a potential alternative for evaluation of instructional packaging and delivery.

In this panel we explore a pilot effort using course portfolios as a framework for faculty to communicate their effectiveness in teaching and learning, frame scholarship of teaching and learning projects, and to provide models for colleagues and administrators. This pilot effort involves five faculty and staff from different departments who had different motivations for creating a course portfolio. Motivation to create a portfolio ranged from its use as an effective evaluation tool to document reflection and teaching scholarship effort to increasing the impact on student learning. In each case, though, a goal was for others to understand the motivation, style, and structure of instruction which reflects the scholarship of the instructor (Bernstein et al., 2006).

The goal of Instructor 1 was to identify whether course portfolios could effectively communicate his teaching scholarship to his peers, provide evidence to his department that course portfolios can be used as an evaluation tool, and to document his teaching scholarship efforts. Instructor 2 had a similar goal of creating a mechanism to document teaching impact, but also wanted to increase her impact on student learning and introduce the course objectives to a larger audience. Documenting the impact of learning strategies in the classroom was the primary objective of Instructor 3. She hoped to utilize her course portfolio to understand how incorporating active learning strategies in her classroom influenced student motivation, interest, and curiosity towards the subject matter. These three faculty members were joined by an administrator, who prepared his course portfolio with the hope of increasing student expectations, and to provide examples of how teaching philosophy can be tied to practice. The final participant, an instructional consultant, sought to explore this process by designing a portfolio to measure the effectiveness of workshops on college teaching. Although each instructor had a targeted goal in mind, each sought a way to reflect on and document their teaching practices, while also guiding future course revisions, while also guiding future course revisions to enhance and measure student learning.

In conclusion, there is a strong need for documentation of teaching and learning beyond the sole use of student evaluations. Although these evaluations are important, course portfolios offer an opportunity to both reflect on and document teaching practices and development, leading to scholarly production. This panel explores a college-wide effort to expand the documentation of teaching and learning through the use of course portfolios, created through a partnership between faculty, administration, and staff, to promote institutional change from the micro- and meso-levels. Throughout the panel, we will engage attendees in questions to help identify factors regarding the documentation of teaching at their own institutions as well as helping to develop strategies for bottom-up institutional change.

Informed by a range of SoTL research on student engagement and pedagogical partnerships (see for example Kuh et al., 2008, Cook-Sather., 2014), a new Social Sciences programme introduced at University College Dublin aspired to embedding partnership as an ethos and part of its culture from the start of first year (Moore-Cherry et. al., 2016). The key rationale was to mainstream the opportunities of partnership working to enhance student engagement throughout the entire cohort (Moore-Cherry et al., 2016).

This paper reports on one initiative, a partnership approach to the design of orientation. Orientation was targeted as a a useful space to begin to create engaging, interactive and student friendly partnerships that would allow stronger relationships with faculty and peers to be created (Bozick, 2007). International research on student transitions to university highlights the importance of this key period, as those who have difficulties with the transition may perform poorly and/or disengage at an early stage from university life (Lowe and Cook, 2003; Pitkethly and Prosser, 2001).

We explore the role of current students (as orientation consultants and peer mentors) in enabling a culture of learning with incoming students. McKinney (2007: 120) argues that the ‘applications of SoTL results... [are] most often, at the course, or classroom level’. In this paper, we explore the adoption of a ‘students as partners’ approach to orientation planning and delivery encompassing academics, professional services staff, peer mentors, and incoming students to demonstrate that the outcome of complex engagements such as this can be transformational at the programme level.

The existing peer mentor scheme where second and third year students are trained to deliver a set of activities designed by staff was reviewed and Marcia Ody (University of Manchester) was invited to UCD with the explicit aim of providing students with the skills and structure to co-design the new orientation programme. This enabled peer mentors to become pioneers and draw on their first hand experiences as mentees to become co-designers of the peer mentor programme.

The paper draws on qualitative data gathered as part of a reflective practice approach, by staff and students, to report on the challenges and opportunities of mainstreaming partnership working through the orientation process. The extent to which this programme level change can be seen as an example of what Roxå et al. (2008) have termed cultural changes, to facilitate a more inclusive culture of learning, will be considered.

Research evidence suggests that the relationships between students and teachers in higher education are a key factor in fostering student engagement, and contributing to positive student outcomes (Lamport, 1993; Zepke & Leach, 2010). Increasingly, the relationships between students and teachers are also recognised as laying the foundations for good student-staff partnership working (Cook-Sather, Bovill & Felten, 2014, Cook-Sather & Chiles, 2011). In addition, Roxå and Mårtensson (2009) have examined significant networks and microcultures in higher education and have demonstrated how university departments considered successful in terms of learning and teaching tend to be those that encourage informal connections between teachers where they can talk about learning and teaching. Drawing together the work on significant networks and microcultures with the literature about the importance of relationships within students as partners work, Woolmer, Marquis and Bovill (2017) have recently begun to investigate the informal conversations taking place between staff and students.

In this paper, I present details of a programme of initiatives taking place at the University of Edinburgh, which aim to change the culture of learners through enhancing the relationships and increasing conversations about learning and teaching between staff and teachers. These initiatives include a new student engagement network for staff and students involving regular events, a new set of practical booklets focused on different aspects of student engagement, and ‘coffee and cake conversations’, a scheme that connects a volunteer staff member with three volunteer students from the same School to go for free coffee and cake. Each of the initiatives will be presented in more detail.

Each initiative has been evaluated using questionnaires sent to participants after the first year of operation. Respondents describe the initiatives in terms of being fun, having relevance, and as a stimulus for changing teaching practices to become more engaging. I will present the evaluation findings in more depth to illustrate how the programme of engagement is slowly contributing to changing the culture of learners at the University of Edinburgh. Participants will be invited to share any similar schemes at their own universities aimed at changing the culture of learners and enhancing student and staff engagement.

In 2014, we started an innovative approach to deliver a first year Anatomy and Physiology course for first year nursing students whereby the instructor created detailed skeleton concept maps that the students filled out each week throughout the course. This approach has since been extended into path-physiology and patho-pharmacology courses in the second year. We have collected copies of concept maps from research participants across several courses, and are working on methods to analyze such complex data for evidence of student learning. Many SoTL studies seek evidence of student learning beyond the self-perception of the students or improvement in student grades – but in practice this is a difficult task. In this workshop, we will share our process so far in working with these learning artifacts, inspired in part by the work of Von Der Heidt (2015). Workshop participants will have an opportunity to practice this kind of analysis using exemplars from our data, and consider how they may apply this kind of approach to their own studies.

Concept maps have been identified by Jaafarpour, Aazami, & Mozafari (2016) as having a positive effect on the academic achievement in nursing students. Schwendimann (2015) after reviewing a range of studies investigating concept maps concludes that, “when used sensibly and skillfully, concept maps can be powerful tools to support knowledge integration processes of complex ideas” (p. 89) and argues that “concept mapping can foster students’ learning for conceptual understanding instead of for memorization of isolated ideas” (p. 87). This workshop will explore means and challenges of actually assessing this kind of learning within the concept maps. We have since found that many of the students who were exposed to concept maps in the first year subsequently started making their own in later years. We would like to understand who benefits the most from using concept maps – stronger or weaker students – and who is more likely to continue using them after the first year.

Conversations about a crisis in higher education have been growing in the past two decades. The neo-liberal model of a corporate university threatens to undermine academic freedom, the size and integrity of the professoriate, and research foci. We are also faced with processes that commodify students, dichotomize teaching and research, and divide administrators and faculty. So how do we enact change within our institutions and beyond?

As a common starting point, we assert that a guerrilla-style approach to leadership, informed by Che Guevara’s handbook on guerrilla warfare (1961) and coupled with critical pedagogy, can be particularly effective in shifting conversations around cultures of learning and cultures of learners in ways that challenge dichotomies; furthermore, deploying a guerrilla leadership model can help us to advocate on behalf of and partner with students, stand as allies across traditional boundaries, and promote holistic, student-centred teaching and learning practices and processes.

Guerrilla leadership operates effectively within the micro-levels of the institutional culture. This form of leadership is agile, mobile, responsive, tenacious, grassroots, and supported from and by local populations. Actions available in this approach include strategic activism, with repetitive and dispersed incursions on multiple fronts, to shift conversations, disrupt centres of power, and create meaningful institutional change. Guerrilla leaders are attuned to the politics of their context, build alliances to achieve common goals, and acknowledge that their efforts often face resistance. The principles that underlie this approach are most closely aligned with social justice and the various situational roles of advocate, champion, or ally. This model borrows from many approaches, and offers us a different lens by which to consider how we approach our work in promoting a culture of learning in our respective fields and our institutions.

Members of the International panel provide examples in a comparative and localized application of the metaphor of guerrilla leadership, thus providing us with insights about both common and unique challenges we face in our efforts to foster a culture of learning in our disciplines and our institutions. All our conversations about the metaphor of guerrilla warfare have been thought-provoking and provocative; however, we believe that provocation can help us all build capacities for strategic engagement as educational leaders. Our experiences tell us that leading change in teaching and learning can be difficult and we want to create a space that acknowledges that conflict exists but also provide a space of hope.

Longstanding challenges face graduate education and are key drivers toward a new doctoral education model: long time to degree, high attrition, preparation focused on dwindling academic careers, lack of knowledge about career opportunities, weak transferable skills, and narrowly focused scholars ill-equipped to work globally, broadly, and creatively. The classical apprenticeship model does not engender learner autonomy or active engagement in the education process, and lacks varied career preparation. This workshop describes a transformative doctoral education model (TDEM), offering options to traditional graduate education and seeks to transform the student to a multidimensional adaptive scholar. In TDEM, a multidimensional adaptive scholar is defined as a mentally and situationally flexible, forward thinking individual firmly rooted in empirically based-knowledge who is able to consume, organize, and analyze complex information and render it into understandable and actionable material. TDEM streamlines doctoral education into an experience of intentional, pertinent, and meaningful learning opportunities. Focus is placed on the acquisition and refinement of knowledge and skills that are useful across job sectors. In TDEM the program, faculty, and students work synergistically to create a climate of learning driven by students’ educational and career needs. The model is dynamic making it highly customizable to individuals, disciplines, and programs. Eight components compose the model. Four units own roles in fulfilling the model components. Workshop attendees will participate in individual reflection and concept mapping, as well as small group discussion. Attendees will tie personal educational and current institutional experience to TDEM, and plan possible action items to help ameliorate challenges their students might be experiencing.

Formative feedback processes, whereby instructors give feedback to students to enhance their learning, are well-established practices in higher education. In our work as educational developers we asked ourselves “what happens when you change the focus of feedback from instructor to student ― from various sources of feedback to the instructor?” Hubbal and Clarke (2011) and Shute (2008) report formative feedback processes are practical, doable, and enhance teaching and student learning, yet these processes are under-researched and leave a gap in knowledge (Smith, 2001; Gromally, Evans & Brickman, 2014).

We draw upon Smith’s (2001) belief that “… formative evaluation is essential to the learning necessary for faculty to improve teaching, scholarly teaching, and a scholarship of teaching” (p. 60). Our curiosity about formative feedback processes and engagement in learning environments in higher education are the foundations of this study. We define formative feedback as an intentional, voluntary, developmental strategy for instructors to receive feedback about their teaching with the goal of better understanding and improving student learning (Brookfield, 2015; Smith, 2001; Weimer, 2013).

The research questions: 1. How is formative feedback for teaching development defined and described? 2. Is there a demand for formative feedback for teaching development resources, strategies and examples? 3. What resources are available in teaching and learning centres? 4. What are some examples of formative feedback for teaching development processes and how do these enhance the scholarship of teaching and learning?

This survey research (Andres, 2012) was conducted in winter 2018, following Institutional ethics approval. The sample was purposefully selected (Creswell, 2014), to include TLS centres in North America, Europe, and Australia. Participants were recruited via electronic listservs.

Preliminary findings indicate that formative feedback for teaching development processes are supported in most of the institutions that responded. Regarding definitions, respondents reported a range of terms, including: coaching, peer-feedback, observations, student feedback, instructor-initiated, developmental, with goals to improve teaching, student learning, and to use towards promotion and tenure. Some respondents indicated that formative feedback for teaching development was not a priority and that teaching was still not valued, while others were hopeful that it was being initiated in their institution. The respondents were generous with sharing resources and websites related to formative feedback for teaching development. These resources are categorized and posted on our institutional website. These findings will benefit learning environments that hopefully will embrace a culture of formative feedback processes for teaching development.

The current corpus of research on feedback acknowledges its role in directing learning (Shute, 2008; Hattie & Timperley, 2007). However, for feedback to be an effective tool for learning, students must first understand what the gold standard is for their work, be able to identify the gaps between that standard and what they have produced, ad understand how to use feedback to alter that gap (Sadler, 1989). They also require the time and space to receive and process the feedback they receive (Winstone et al., 2017). More recent research (i.e. Jonsson, 2012; Nicol, 2013; Nicol, Thomson, & Breslin, 2014) supports a shift from a transmission model of feedback to a dialogic approach, so that students develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to make evaluative judgments about their own work and the work of others. Despite the multitude of research on feedback, Winstone et al. (2017) note a dearth of studies that actively investigate the dynamics of the process for feedback, and the use of technology to facilitate the interactional guidance students receive in understanding how to use feedback in ways that also develop their self-efficacy.

This small-scale SoTL study has its foundations in the ‘seven principles of good feedback practice’ published by Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) that emphasises the importance of feedback as a two-way communicative process. Using Padlet, a virtual notice board hosted online, students are provided the time and space to receive, organise and collate both inter and intra modular feedback comments and assessment criteria for later use during open dialogues with peers and their instructor/s. The intent of these discussions is to enable students to navigate and close gaps between their current performance and what they have come to understand as the relevant standards. Our research-in-progress includes the collection of qualitative and quantitative data through student and staff surveys and semi-structured interviews, where participants are asked to provide their thoughts on the use of Padlet to engage in dialogues related to students’ effective use of feedback and their confidence to use these strategies and skills in the future. This study has profound implications for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with similar widening participation agendas. Session participants will have the opportunity to consider the impact of effective feedback on student attainment, share their experiences, make recommendations for research-in-progress, and develop a more inclusive culture for learning and enhancing the first-year student experience.