Co-Designing with Students: The Good, The Bad, and The Not-So Ugly
It’s the first day of classes. You arrive on the classroom on campus, pick a seat. The instructor hands out a syllabus, with more “TBD”s listed than actual content. There are directed readings for only the first few weeks of the course. There is a final project but no clear grading scheme. The instructor says, “This is an open syllabus. We’re going to build the remaining parts of the syllabus together.”
What would you want to include in this syllabus? Do you want common readings every week? Do you want time for self-directed reading? Do you want a clear rubric from the instructor or do you want a say in how you’re being graded? Do you want to grade yourself?
Co-designing with students can occur on a variety of levels within a course. Co-design can foster an inclusive culture, student engagement, and deep learning. However, poorly implemented co-design can feel disorienting, unfulfilling, and extraneous on learning. Is co-designing with students a pragmatic educational model? As a graduate student in a learning design Master’s program, my peers and I have discussed and participated in many co-design activities. To critically analyze the use and efficacy of co-design in education, I spoke with six of my peers about our co-designing experiences in our graduate seminar courses. Three common experiences are: selecting weekly readings, creating rubrics, and self-grading.
Selecting Weekly Readings
My peers described two scenarios in which students select readings for the week. In the first scenario, one student selects a reading for the class to read and discuss. In the second scenario, each student selects individual readings, and the discussion consists of each person summarizing their own readings then the class working together to find connections between readings. My peers noted that, irrespective of the two scenario types, they generally enjoyed picking their own readings. While my peers tended to have similar comments on both scenarios, each scenario has unique aspects of co-design that were sometimes viewed as beneficial and other times not so much.
In the first scenario, where one student picks a common reading for the class, the instructor provided a bank of articles to choose from but also encouraged students to find articles not included in the bank. Students could choose readings relevant to the research and literature review they were doing for their individual course projects. Students submit their proposed reading to the instructor for approval. Articles were not approved typically because the reading was too specific to a certain area or did not use a particular research methodology. If the reading is not approved, the instructor provides guidance on a reading that would be better suited to the whole class. The discussion would then revolve around the topic of the reading, rather than the reading trying to fit a certain topic.
My peers spoke to this first scenario by explaining that these dives into the specific area the student was engaged in changed reading from feeling like busy work to being a meaningful task. My peers found that sharing a bit of each person’s research helped expand their views on their own research and led them to consider new perspectives. However, my peers noted that jumping between topic areas across classes did not feel coherent and it was hard to determine what they should be leaving the course deeply understanding. One of my peers emphasized how, in addition to the content of readings, the sequencing of readings is important in building one’s learning.
In the second scenario, students read from individually curated reading lists. Each week for the remaining three weeks of the course, students selected three readings they found interesting or applicable to their current projects or career. Students submitted their reading lists, but the instructor did not provide guidance because this design was meant to give students the space to just explore. During the class discussion, students talked about what they read, what they learned from the readings, and what they wanted to read next. Students created an annotated bibliography tracking their readings and the decisions made around choosing them.
My peers noted that the learning process in this scenario felt organic in that, if you felt you picked a reading that wasn’t quite on track with your interests, you could simply stop reading and pick a different article. One peer explained that the true power of this activity came with the discussion. She explained that conversing about individuals’ thoughts, interests, directions, and questions was a beneficial social aspect of learning.
My peers enjoyed selecting their own readings, but a common theme across both scenarios is the potential disconnect between the student-selected readings and the course learning goals.
“I really just think of this as a form of active learning because you are charged with the responsibility to come in, to decide on some questions you want to ask… I think it’s good to put some of that responsibility on the student because it drives their thinking forward, but I’m torn because there’s no scaffolding.”
How do we scaffold this activity? Is instructor guidance alone enough? A vital first step is explaining to students why the instructor is choosing to design the course this way. When students understand why they are being asked to select readings, it will be easier to work with them to create appropriate activities, such as workshopping how to approach finding an appropriate article. Another aspect to keep in mind when co-designing through selected readings is accessibility. To further create an inclusive experience, students should share articles that are accessible, or in a format compatible with screen-readers and text-to-speech technologies.
Creating Rubrics
My peers and I engaged in rubric creation in again two different situations. In the first situation, students were tasked with creating a rubric to assess posts to an online discussion board. Students were placed in small groups and noted the aspects of an online post they found most important to their learning. Students then reconvened and combined these aspects into a rubric, noting the weight to place on each metric. In the second situation, students created a rubric for the final course project. Again, students broke into small groups and decided what they would like the instructor to focus on when grading the projects. These group rubrics were then combined to create a common class rubric. The instructor reviewed the rubric, provided input or changes, and determined the weight of each metric.
In the first situation, my peers remembered feeling a bit overwhelmed at the task. Most of us did not have experience creating rubrics and were unsure about what the instructors were looking for. One student noted that we created “what could be a decent set of expectations, but then we almost became stuck to it”. He further expanded, describing how the instructor’s abandoned this rubric after a few weeks because they did not feel it was what they wanted to grade us on. However, because we got used to writing for this rubric, most of the students stuck with their pattern and did not alter their discussion posts when the rubric was no longer used.
My peers noted how the instructor input and involvement in the second situation changed this experience. One student found that “the exercise was useful. It provides context about what we have done in class, what we think would be fair to grade us on. We were thinking of ways to challenge ourselves and were honest in pushing our learning.” What about instructor involvement made such a difference between these two situations?
My peers found the most difficult aspect of creating rubrics to be the mismatch between instructor intentions and student expectations. Leaving students to create a rubric without instructor input can be ineffective. How can a rubric incorporate the multiple intentions between students and faculty? As a response to this question, one student remarked that it would be nice to start with a draft rubric from the instructor. If not a draft, then an open dialogue about expectations between the instructor and students can help to scaffold this activity as well. Co-designing a rubric with students provides the opportunity to discuss how instructor’s intentions align with the student experience. This activity provides a space for instructors to reflect on their course while simultaneously allowing for students to engage in metacognitive thinking and critically analyze their learning.
Self-Grading
Three of six of my peers were currently assigned a self-grading task in one of their courses. In this course, students assign themselves a grade in each of five categories, including participation during discussions. In addition, students are required to respond to a number of questions about their learning experience, such as how deeply they engaged with the readings. The instructor told the students that, unless she can refute the student’s grades with evidence, she will accept whatever grade the students give themselves as the final course grade. After completing the final project, students have one week to reflect on their learning and complete the self-grading assignment.
The peers that are assigned this activity discussed current worries about the possibility of giving themselves a grade they didn’t necessarily deserve. The students talked about how this self-grading activity will be a process of self-worth, whether that’s a process they want to go through at this moment in their education or not. One student expressed how she would appreciate scaffolding around this activity, saying “I think [scaffolding] would be more helpful for me than being by myself and thinking like, ‘well I think I deserve an A because I have a GPA that I need to be cognizant of, or I could reflect honestly on what I think I’m doing.’” Another student talked about the permanence of grades in general.
“Grades have such an impact on everything you strive for… I would really value honest feedback that isn’t detrimental to a metric that shows the world my own value, worth, and competency.”
Because grades are such a ubiquitous signal to those outside education, a self-grading activity must be outlined in a way that allows students to have honest reflection on their learning without detrimental consequence. One way to scaffold this co-design activity is to have both the instructor and the students contemplate what merits an “A”. Establishing a common understanding of what constitutes each grade can help alleviate some of the student’s worries. A common understanding would necessarily have to stem from conversation about course learning goals, evidence of those goals, the intentions of the instructor, and the student learning experience.
My peers found their experiences with all three co-design activities described above akin to active, constructivist, self-directed, and student-centered learning. My peers also emphasized how the selected readings encouraged students to teach other students, as students can be responsible not only for choosing an article for the week but for also facilitating that week’s discussion. While these co-design activities were generally supported by my peers, they pointed out that the process and framework for co-design are complicated and are in need of scaffolding. Co-designing with students can instead just feel like active learning when students are not brought into the course design process early on. A dialogue between instructors and students about the intentions for a course can move learning activities into the co-design space, giving students the chance to bridge theory and practice. Open communication between instructors and students builds a partnership, makes transparent the intentions of all parties involved, and truly incorporates students into designing course activities that demonstrate student’s learning.
“When you are forced to think about, and are responsible for, other people’s learning outcomes, in addition to learning yourself, I think it makes the learning that much deeper.”
Co-designing is valuable for learning, even students agree. Students and instructors should together work through difficulties to establish effective co-design frameworks.
