What is a sticky course and how we hope to explore this?

Author

Dr Claire Orwin
Project lead, De Montfort University

The concept of a sticky campus has been in existence for some time. Universities have recognised the need to provide a campus which entices students to come to & stay on campus in a bid to maximise student engagement and to meet the needs of student cohorts who live both on & off site. Contemporary factors, however, are challenging how students engage with their campus.

• The cost-of-living crisis has increased financial pressure on students impacting housing, food and transport costs, and consequently the cost of getting to & staying on campus.
• Student working patterns are affecting students’ ability to engage on campus with 56% of students working, on average 14.5 hours a week.
• The pandemic had various impacts on the wellbeing and social relationships of young people. The shift to online learning across the education sector socialised alternative ways to engage in learning, developing a potential preference away from campus-based learning for some students.

 These pressures can lead students to question the value of coming on to campus when they can catch up on lectures online and make use of remote learning resources in the comfort of their own home. Which for many can be more convenient when balancing work, commuting & caring commitments.

So how can our university experience help to encourage students to engage in spite of these wider challenges?

The Student Academic Experience Survey consistently reports teaching quality and course content as key drivers in the perception of good value. If the course is king, how do we position our courses to provide a compelling educational offer where students are highly engaged in all aspects of their study?  How do we effectively transition students into university so they build their sense of belonging and confidence swiftly and feel engaged with their course? How do we develop peer communities to connect students off campus and maintain their sense of belonging when they are at a distance?

We are exploring these big questions in our QAA Collaborative Enhancement Sticky Courses project. Looking to identify how we can make our courses sticky so students ‘stick to and stick with’ their learning. Building on the sticky campus and sticky curriculum, we are exploring how we develop co-created experiences with students as active agents in their learning to develop greater connection and help our students to become more engaged.

The three strands of our QAA sticky courses project cover different elements of the student journey from transition into the University to student-centred pedagogy that seeks to place students at the centre of their learning, to how we use online peer communities to support transition and belonging within their course. We see these strands as interconnected, when combined they have the potential to develop a more holistic approach to supporting student retention and attainment and become more impactful. We see these strands, much like strands within a yarn, becoming much stronger when combined together. Likewise, as a project team through the project we are drawing together our collective experiences and activity to explore each of these strands from a multi-institutional perspective to strengthen our outputs, working as staff but also with students to really explore what makes a course sticky.

For more information about the project and the partners visit the project web page.