The view from western shores
CUTIE has been more of a community than a ‘project’, bringing together people with
a shared passion for enhancing teaching and learning and who want to ensure that
all students have the very best learning experience. The joint focus on student
partnership and the support of those who lead programmes has aligned perfectly
with our own mission in CELT (the University of Galway’s Centre for Excellence in
Learning and Teaching).
Our student co-created Digital Champions scheme has fed directly into the project
and vice-versa. Exploring new technological developments such as Gen AI which
burst onto the scene during the project injected energy and enthusiasm for
experimentation as well as raising crucial questions about education, technology,
and ethics. The work on WP3 to review and compare models of co-creation and
partnership has helped us situate our own work in a wider context and provided
many examples from which we learned a great deal. We also saw the value of
student voice in other aspects of programme organisation and management and
supported, as part of our contribution, a pilot student quality review of a new online
programme.
The role of Programme Leader or Head of Department can be a challenging one and
we have often noted how little training and development is provided for academics
who find themselves in such posts, particularly in terms of pedagogical leadership
and digital education. Co-leading on Work Package 4 enabled us to focus efforts on
this crucial dimension and with the contributions from across the CUTIE consortium
we were able to not only produce some shareable learning materials, but soon
realised the scope for a full online course on digital leadership. We were delighted to
work in partnership with Ireland’s National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching &
Learning to bring this idea to fruition, hosting a pilot course on their Opencourses.ie
platform and making it widely available.
To find over 300 people registering an interest in just the pilot version, demonstrates
how much of a demand there is for professional development in this topic. Whilst, of
course, not all of those were able to fully undertake the 6 week course, all were able
to access, and download the resources and materials for either personal study or
adaptation under the Creative Commons licence.
Facilitating the live sessions and reading the submitted coursework was a privilege
for us. People were open about the challenges they face and generous with their
ideas. Indeed, many consented to participate in a parallel research project that will
extend the work on developing appropriate and targeted professional development
opportunities for such staff within universities.
Now that CUTIE is formally drawing to an end, brings a certain sense of sadness,
but we know well that the collaboration and partnerships it established will continue
in other forms, other projects, well into the future. Thank you to all of our colleagues
across the institutions, or as we say in Ireland, Go raibh míle maith agat.