Liz Hardie ~ Centre Director, The Scholarship Centre for innovation in online Legal and Business education (SCiLAB)
What happens when a Virtual Courtroom escape room, a WhatsApp peer mentoring community, the Chartered Association of Business Schools and two learning designers meet? (I’m not sure if this sounds like a bad joke or the start of a cryptic quiz 😊). The answer is The Open University’s (OU) Faculty of Business and Law (FBL)’s annual Festival of Scholarship which involved all of these. The Festival took place on 13th November, organised by SCiLAB, FBL’s scholarship and innovation centre, highlighting business, legal, and policing scholarship which has taken place over the last year. Read on to find out more…
Vision, Practice and Partnership
Vision was provided by the faculty’s Executive Dean Mark Durkin, who gave the opening welcome. He reminded participants about the importance of scholarship in improving the teaching we provide to enable transformative, high-quality, digitally enabled education (the keystone of the OU’s proposed new strategy). This message was re-enforced by the closing reflections of Kara Johnson, the faculty’s Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning, who spoke about the power of scholarship to transform education and provide an evidence base to challenge assumptions.
Practice insights and suggestions were provided by our 19 presenters who shared the findings and recommendations from eight Faculty scholarship projects and three pan-university projects. The event included three panels bringing together a range of different projects around a common theme, as explored further below. We were also delighted to welcome a guest appearance from two OU learning designers, Paul Astles and Jake Hilliard, who shared insights on learning design scholarship which involved business, law and policing modules and programmes.
Partnership was highlighted by the involvement of Jess Guth from the Association of Law Teachers and Oliver Lowe from the Chartered Association of Business Schools. Keynote speaker Jess reflected on her own scholarship journey, while Oliver offered an overview of the key issues facing Business Schools. Both speakers emphasised the role scholarship can play in improving our teaching and addressing the challenges facing universities today.
Bridging the Divide
The first panel discussion explored scholarship connecting learning and the workplace. The role of reflection within professional practice was explored through a study of policing and highlighted how supporting deeper levels of critical reflection can lead to transformational learning both at university and in the workplace.
The second presentation considered how to support postgraduate students who are typically already working within a business setting. This project re-enforced the value students put on diverse, flexible, and student-centred support mechanisms while maintaining consistent tutor and institutional support. The final project discussed the challenges and barriers faced by students seeking recognition of prior experiential learning (RPEL), often gained within their workplace, within their qualifications.
Beyond the Textbook
The second panel highlighted scholarship which moved beyond the written textbook and developed effective online learning opportunities. An escape room featured in the scholarhsip exploring the use of a virtual courtroom simulation for criminal law, which demonstrated the potential of desktop virtual simulations to consolidate knowledge and develop skills. The benefits of including game design in teaching was demonstrated through scholarship which evaluated the effectiveness of designing a game to understand green transitions within organisations. The project considering degree apprenticeship progression and retention discovered important insights into the differences between younger and more mature learners. Younger apprenticeships required more formalised and structured workplace support and learning opportunities. Finally a project considering how we teach law students legal research skills found confusion between staff and students about the meaning of the phrase, recommending greater consistency and explanation for students. This scholarship work is being developed into online activities to better support students’ research skills through a badged course.
Building and scaling success
The final panel focused on the critical topic of supporting students to succeed in their studies. One project shared the lessons learnt from running a first year undergraduate peer mentoring project at scale using WhatsApp, an initiative which was popular with students and led to increased engagement but also encountered some logistical and resourcing issues.
Cross-university projects discussed their findings on both the enablers and barriers for students with mental health challenges, as well as access and participation to Postgraduate Research Degree programmes for neurodivergent postgraduate researchers. The role of the tutor in supporting students was considered through scholarship considering the impact of tutors who hold a dual role within the university.
This scholarship found a more complex and intersectional pattern of tutors’ experience (such as their prior teaching or practice roles) and the contribution they make to student success. Interestingly, the scholarship also found that in the OU Law School, the positive impact of tutors with dual roles seemed particularly evident before the new curriculum, suggesting the new degree has integrated some of that learning for all staff.
The event demonstrated the importance of vision, practice and partnership in scholarship. The range of scholarship practice presented at the event was impressive, ranging from learning in the workplace to pedagogical innovations in teaching practice to effective student support.
The partnership with academics from across the University and legal and business education organisations supported a lively discussion and insightful suggestions on future teaching developments. And this all supported a vision where evidence-based teaching practice leads to transformational high-quality education for the twenty-first century.
Contact SCiLAB with any queries and for more information on any of our projects. You can also contact the Learning Design team at: [email protected].
Banner image: eROMAZe via Canva Pro