Office of the Vice-President for Teaching & Learning - Reports
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Item UCC Civic Engagement Plan 2017-2022.(University College Cork, 2017-12) Galvin, Martin; O'Mahony, Catherine; Powell, Fred; Neville, KarenThis civic engagement plan was drafted by the University Civic and Community Engagement Committee, following extensive consultations with staff, students and community stakeholders. It is grounded in a benchmarking exercise, a review of international literature and best practices, and is informed by a self assessment of UCC’s engagement activity in 2016, which was supported by the Carnegie Foundation. A staff survey conducted in 2016 found that there was reasonable staff activity in the area of community engagement. However, staff cited barriers such as having insufficient time, a lack of recognition or valuing of engagement, and engagement needing to be integral to the mission of the University. They further referred to a fragmented organisational approach and needing better communication and information centrally. Recently Milward-Brown surveyed a representative sample of 400 people across the Munster region on behalf of UCC. The results showed that public understanding of the societal engagement mission of the University is low compared to other factors; underscoring the importance of more intently demonstrating and communicating the value of our engagement work to the public.Item Mapping research across the undergraduate curriculum in UCC(University College Cork, 2017-08) O'Mahony, Catherine; O'Sullivan, Aideen; Sugrue, Aonghus; McNulty, John; Fouhy, Eleanor; O'Halloran, JohnUCC identifies itself as a research-led University and has stated the ambition to strengthen the integration of research, teaching and learning by maximising opportunities for students to participate in research programmes throughout their undergraduate studies. The number of undergraduate programmes with student-involved research from first year onwards is an important measure of this ambition. A curriculum analytics project was enacted by CIRTL staff and Academic Systems Administration to gather evidence of research-oriented and research-based teaching in undergraduate programmes offered to students via the CAO system in 2015/2016. The review showed that 55% of undergraduate programmes make explicit mention of research and inquiry in their programme learning outcomes. Analysis of module learning outcomes further showed that 45% of the reviewed programmes provide students with exposure to research-based or research-oriented teaching across the duration of their programme. The project provides an important baseline of existing research in the undergraduate curriculum, it uncovers exemplar activities across a range of subject areas and disciplines, and extends the vocabulary around research and inquiry to include discipline-specific approaches and understandings. Future work will include gathering feedback from staff and qualitative research with students to correct any inaccuracies in the data with a view to refining the search query and running a regular, more automated analysis.