Like all staff at FE institutions across the country, teachers at Gloucestershire College are keen to make use of cutting-edge technology to enhance their students’ learning experience. Accordingly, the college has assembled a tech-savvy panel of experts to assess and give feedback on the latest apps and ed tech in order to encourage innovative practice among its teachers.

These experts were not brought in from Google or Microsoft, however. Instead, the college focused on people much closer to home with a unique perspective on effective learning: the students themselves.

A pilot of Gloucestershire College’s Student Innovators project was started in 2014. Since then, it has been rolled out across its departments. The college reports that it has resulted in greater engagement from learners, who have been given greater freedom to innovate and drive best practice at the college.

Power to students

Next week, participants from the college will be speaking at Jisc Digifest to explain what lessons from the project could be passed on to other institutions (see box, below).

The network has grown over the past three years, says Catherine Hartell, creator of the Student Innovators project, primarily because students have had the chance to make a difference to the way that their classes - and their college - is run.

We’ve tried all sorts of different apps - the good, the bad and the ugly

The scheme works by students independently researching and reviewing apps. They then publish their feedback in the form of a blog. Apps that do particularly well become the college’s “App of the week”, and details are then published on the college’s virtual learning environment, and included in all staff emails.

“We’ve tried all sorts of different apps - the good, the bad and the ugly,” says Hartell. “We review them all and put them on a blog to document what apps the students have used.”

Initially, the project only involved a handpicked group of innovators, and was tightly controlled by the digital-learning coaches on the college staff. But students now govern the network themselves, and projects, such as a system of college-wide augmented-reality hotspots, aimed at aiding revision, have been developed as a result.

The Student Innovators project has become so deeply ingrained in college life that new teachers are now briefed about it and asked to learn about and review apps that they can use in their own classrooms.

Hartell says that the project has given many students the confidence to take charge of their learning and really help their teachers make the most of the technology at their disposal. “I’ve had a few students…and they’ve been quite shy, very self-reserved. But coming through [the project] and seeing that their feedback has been viewed, accepted, used in a really positive way, and is making a difference in the college, quite a lot of students have [built up] quite a lot of confidence from doing it.”

The future looks bright for the Student Innovators project. Although it is currently used only in an FE setting, Hartell says that there is potential for it to be applied within the higher education element of the college, too. “I think it could work on any level within education,” she says. “I don’t think it has to be purely FE. I think it potentially could go to primary and secondary [schools]. There are ways you could mould it to fit those.”

@willmartie