Co-creation in Teaching

Partnering with students in the design and implementation of learning experiences can have many benefits for both learners and instructors. Students can contribute to their education in meaningful ways, which can enhance their engagement in the course and the achievement of their academic goals. Instructors can gain insight into what helps their students learn and design more effective learning environments. Core aspects of co-creation are partnership, mutuality, and dialogue, rather than unidirectionality (Cook Sather et al., 2018). 

Examples of Pedagogical Co-creation

There are a variety of ways that instructors can co-create with their learners in classes of all sizes and disciplines; a few are noted below, but there are many other possibilities. 

• Classroom agreements – Invite students to share what they feel is important for establishing a positive culture in the classroom for discussions or other activities and use their responses to create course agreements.  

• Student-developed assessment questions – Give students the opportunity to draft questions or prompts for a quiz, exam, or writing assignment and choose several for the actual exam.  

• General course design and pedagogy – Ask students for anonymous feedback midterm via a survey (see Office of Teaching Evaluation and Assessment Research resources), with simple questions such as: What should start; What should stop; What should continue? Reflect on this feedback and consider what is feasible, aligns with your teaching philosophy, and learning goals and make any changes. Such allows teaching practices to be cocreated with students.  

• Student topic days – Invite students to share their areas of interest and hold time during the semester for further explorations of these topics. In this way, students are co-creating course content with the instructor.  

A Few Considerations 

High Enrollment Courses 

• Use Digital Tools: Various technologies are designed to make work easier. Instructors can also leverage them to scale up co-creation in large-sized courses. For example, an instructor can use polling and other digital tools to capture student voices and synthesize or summaries the responses to guide instruction. Such tools can be used in courses of any size.  

• Implement Small Group Activities: Form smaller groups can enable smaller micro-communities to engage in co-creation in a course whose responses can be shared with the entire class with or without digital technologies. Learning assistants employed by the Learning Centers can support such activities in courses and instructors can consider usage of various active learning spaces on campus.   

Co-creation in Departmental Teaching Efforts and Committees 

While co-creation can occur within individual courses, it can also happen at higher levels. Departments can invite students with relevant academic experience to play roles in courses and curricular design to promote effective teaching. Departments can also conduct focus groups or surveys to gain more insights into ways to produce effective teaching to support their co-creation efforts. Students can be invited as members or periodic contributors to faculty and other committees focused on teaching or curricular design.  

Getting Started 

Instructors might ask how they can get started with co-creation. They can take an inventory of their current teaching approaches to determine whether any might be considered co-creation and consider building from those activities and trying more.  Instructors new to co-creation can take small steps and integrate smaller-scale activities appropriate to their course contexts. 

Reference

Cook-Sather, A., Matthews, K. E., Ntem, A., & Leathwick, S. (2018). What we talk about when we talk about students as partners. International Journal for students as partners, 2(2), 1-9.  

Note: This resource was created following a Tea and Teaching with Jenevieve event on October 19, 2024.