Co-creating engagement with the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education: modelling good practice in partnership curriculum design with early career academic staff

For academics, assessment commonly focuses on summative evaluation of student performance against appropriate standards or criteria, with a view to generating grades which are reliable, valid, and defensible (Winstone & Boud, 2020). Whilst this is an integral part of academic process, it is important to consider how undertaking an assessment task can be a valuable learning opportunity in itself (e.g. Boud & Soler, 2016).

The course team for the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE) at the University of Portsmouth wanted to empower students to take an active role in designing their assessment to become more engaged with the process. As educational developers, we have often found ourselves asked by colleagues how to ‘do co-creation’. While there are some worthy empirical examples to be found (e.g. Meer & Chapman, 2015) they do not always support inexperienced academic colleagues who often grapple with how they can initiate co-creation. Because of this, we perceived engaging in co-creation would be an opportunity to model good practice with our cohort. Within the sector, co-creation was additionally becoming an approach which had gained traction, including being embedded in quality assurance processes (Dunbar-Morris et al., 2021).

We wanted to use co-creative approaches as a way of demonstrating broader concepts about curriculum design to our cohort of early career 101 academics and to encourage the use of co-creation with their own students.