Resource Hub for Student Engagement during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Supporting effective student engagement during the Covid-19 pandemic will be difficult for staff and students across higher education. The NStEP Report on Institutional Approaches and accompanying Quick Guides below provide tips and pointers on maintaining meaningful lines of communication, feedback and engagement between staff and students. All of these resources are designed to assist staff and students during the crisis to find short-term solutions, while also to begin preparing for more medium-term developments in to the next academic year, recognising that the consequences of the pandemic will not be short-lived.
View and download the the resources below.
Insight Report: Institutional Approaches to Student Engagement during Covid-19
This short Report provides guidance and tips on maintaining some level of formal or systematic approach to student engagement during the Covid-19 shutdown of higher education. The Report takes a particular focus on five key areas of decision-making where student engagement would normally have occurred regularly in formal, semi-formal and informal ways before the pandemic began. These five key areas are the module-level, programme-level, departments, professional support units, and at the institutional-level.
Senior managers, programme leaders, professional support staff and student representatives may find this Report particularly useful, depending on the context in which they are working.
Quick Guide for Class Reps during Remote Learning
Insight Report: Maintaining Class Rep Systems
This short Report provides guidance on approaching the recruitment and election of class representatives. It outlines the ‘class rep lifecycle’ and some key considerations for maintaining effective and supported class rep systems in an era of remote learning.
Students’ union officers, student engagement staff, quality officers, and senior managers will find this report useful when preparing for the new academic year.
Quick Guide for Staff Who Teach during Remote Learning
Download the Guide: Quick Guide for Staff Who Teach – Supporting Student Engagement during the Covid-19 Crisis
During the pandemic staff and students can also use our #AskTeamNStEP service to seek advice and tips on student engagement practices. Find out more and submit your query here.
Resources for Induction and Orientation
NStEP has produced a Quick Guide for promoting and embedding the message of student engagement through induction and orientation. This Guide is useful for both the remote learning context and in on-campus settings.
View and download the Quick Guide here.
The Guide is also accompanied by a Toolkit. This toolkit provides a template presentation.
Staff-Student Committees (SSCs)
Quick Guide for Effective Staff-Student Committees
View and download the Guide here. This Quick Guide can support the ongoing development and enhancement of student engagement within formal and semi-formal governance committees, including Programme Boards and Student-Staff Forums. The Guide may also inform the creation of temporary staff-student meetings during the crisis, ensuring that these formal opportunities can continue, albeit in an online format.
Quick Guide on Hosting Online Staff-Student Committees
National Student Training Report 2016-2020
Published in August 2020, this national report reviews the feedback received from over 2,300 class reps across four years of the training programme, and details an overview of sectoral consultation and next steps for the future development of NStEP training.
OpinionX – Student Engagement Chat
In June 2020, as part of the review of the current student engagement framework (HEA, 2016), NStEP ran our ‘Student Engagement Chat‘ campaign in partnership with OpinionX. This collaborative initiative allowed students and staff across the sector to inform our work through a discursive and dialogic survey tool.
Resources for Student Engagement – NStEP National Projects
In 2017, the National Working Group of the National Student Engagement Programme (NStEP) Pilot selected five national projects as a focus arising from the themes identified in the Pilot Institutional Analysis report. The objective of each project was to establish guidelines, suitable for the diversity of the sector, on the project area. These projects were as follows:
- The Role and Recruitment of Class Representatives
- The Design, Review and Delivery of Programmes*
- Student Feedback Opportunities, Data and Follow Up
- Students in formal system level procedures, strategy and decision making
- Staff Roles and Capacity Building
Each resulting Project Team worked over a period of 18 months to identify and develop the resources that the sector could utilise to develop effective student engagement practices within their staff and student contexts. In March 2019, each Project Team presented summaries of their findings and of their plans to the NStEP Conference.
In early 2020 NStEP will publish and promote the work of each Project Team, marked by the formal launch of Project Team 5’s ‘Quick Guides for Staff’ on 13th February.
*Please note that Project 4 on the Design, Review and Delivery of Programmes is currently on hold, but that NStEP is planning to publish resources in this area under our new Strategy 2019-2021.
Resources: The Role and Recruitment of Class Representatives
This Project Team, led by NCI and NCI Students’ Union, produced an Insight Report on the Role and Recruitment of Class Representatives, as well as a series of accompanying resources to support facilitated conversations between student representatives and institutional staff, with the ultimate aim of development and enhancement to class rep systems.
The resources are accessible here:
- Insight Report: The Role and Recruitment of Class Representatives
- Resource 1: Defining the Role of the Class Rep Workshop Plan
- Resource 2: Incentivising the Class Rep Role Workshop Plan
- Resource 3: Class Rep System Self-Assessment Tool
- Resource 4: Class Rep System Benchmarking Tool
Resources: Staff Roles and Capacity Building
The Project Team led by Cork Institute of Technology’s AnSEO (Student Engagement Office) and the CIT Students’ Union developed a series of ‘Quick Guides’ for staff in higher education. These guides provide a handy basis for assessing student engagement within your own professional context, including ways in which you might enhance your practices or those of your department.
The Quick Guides can be accessed below:
- A Guide for Senior Management and Staff in Governance
- A Guide for Academic and Learning & Teaching Managers
- A Guide for Students’ Union and Student Engagement Staff
- A Guide for Academics and Other Staff (including Lecturers, Associate Lecturers, Professors, and Technicians)
- A Guide for Professional and Support Staff
Resources: Student Feedback Opportunities, Data and Follow-Up
The Project Team led by Institute of Technology Carlow developed a report on the use of feedback in Irish higher education, examining theory, practice, and enablers to successful student engagement throughout the process.
View the national report here: Student Feedback Opportunities, Data and Follow-Up
Resources: Students in formal system level procedures, strategy and decision making
Check back soon to find out about the interactive projects this Team undertook!
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site and work by the National Student Engagement Programme (NStEP) Ireland is licensed under CC BY 4.0
