A Scalable and Sustainable Model for Co-Creating Laboratory Classes and Improving Employability Skills in the Life Sciences Sector

Co-creation of the curriculum with student partners fosters a greater sense of ownership and belonging to a course and has been widely linked to positive outcomes in terms of professional development and employability skills1,2. With expanding student numbers across the sector and a demand for modern laboratory skills and techniques from employers, it’s important that we are able to keep pace with developing authentic, contemporary lab classes, providing our students with the up to date skills required by employers. To be effective, these classes need to evolve year on year, placing increasing demands on staff. With expanding numbers of students, it is also becoming harder to provide enough wet, final year projects due to limitations of lab capacity and available staff supervisors. Unchecked this perfect storm could create a skills shortage in the sector. Here we present a scalable solution which incorporates co-creation of the curriculum with final year student partners as part of our final year project provision. We have piloted a new style of Hons project which involves the final year student spending a semester in the wet laboratory setting, under supervision, researching and designing new third year undergraduate lab classes. The brief for the lab class is that it needs to be contemporary, student led, flexible and inclusive. The lab class must incorporate data collection, analysis and employ essential laboratory skills which feed into our Royal Society of Biology accreditation skills tracker, which also meets the requirements of the Hons project. We will present the results of the first pilot study which has successfully designed and embedded a new laboratory class into level 3 of the neuroscience degree here at Glasgow. The contemporary lab is then linked to a summative assessment, which also evolves with the lab provision year on year, providing a connectedness to real world challenges and employer demands. We have two cohorts’ worth of feedback and grades from the Level 3 students who took part in the designed lab as well as feedback from the students who undertook the Hons project (one of whom is the co-author of this abstract and proposed presentation). The feedback demonstrates the effectiveness of the process in delivering a meaningful student enabled co-creation experience. It demonstrates an increased sense of engagement and appreciation of relevance and increased confidence in essential skills. We will further present plans to scale the approach to meet the increased capacity and supervision demands for final year wet projects. We will show how we can offer multiple group projects, co-creating multiple different laboratory classes or part thereof, with no increased demand on supervisory requirements because they can be supervised together in a large teaching lab style setting. The above approach systematically works through the three pillars of the University of Glasgow learning and teaching strategy addressing key issues facing the Life Sciences HE sector, successfully improving employability skills provision and crucially evolving that provision year on year to meet demand. The above approach involves student centred active learning, which transforms the curriculum and assessment, developing professional skills and enhancing graduate attributes.