Enabling Student Participation in Course Review and Redesign: Piloting Restorative Practices and Design Thinking in an Undergraduate Criminology Programme

Abstract

Questions remain as to the utility of the data obtained through student feedback, and the extent to which students experience feedback processes as meaningful, and academics revise their teaching accordingly. This project piloted restorative practices and design thinking to enable active student participation (n ¼ 25) in reviewing and redesigning a victimology course within an undergraduate criminology programme. It utilized restorative and design workshops to gather data and facilitate student-lecturer dialogue, and collaborative reflection and ideation. Aligning with the research on dialogue-based student feedback processes, students valued this process, articulated their learning experiences and the course's strengths and weaknesses in sophisticated ways, and co-created many practical, transferrable ideas to meet future students' needs. The project humanized participants, and aided the course leader's efforts to empathize with students, develop their courses, and reflect on their broader teaching and student support practices. This project is easily replicable in criminal justice and criminology programmes globally.

Blurring the distinction between the researcher and the researched: Doing Collective Memory-Work online in Covid times

“…Yet they are expected to empathise with these detached data and to imagine a service which meets the needs of the data-providers. As noted above, there is an increasing move towards including participants as peer researchers and co-creators of knowledge (Vaugh et al, 2020;Marder et al, 2021). Peer perspectives may be infinitely more valid in their interpretation of data and their ability to imagine solutions than those coming from a more etic perspective.…”

Instructors' lived experiences of using learning analytics to improve online course design

“…While student success dashboards provide completion trends, student feedback is also an essential type of evidence instructors consider when revising their online course design. Using student feedback to inform course redesign is common, as demonstrated by recent research (Brandl et al, 2019;Marder et al, 2021;Stoner & Billings, 2021;Theodosiou & Corbin, 2020). However, this study reports on the experiences of faculty pairing student feedback with LA data in planning course revisions, which has not yet received sufficient scholarly attention.…”