Student readiness for co-creation : enhancing active learning for student-staff partnership in higher education

Abstract

Pedagogical innovations that center on co-creation with students for active learning are imperative in the higher education sector. Student co-creation can take different forms including, but not limited to, co-designing assessment components, courses, and curricula, to the even smaller scale of student-authored multiple choice questions. Empirical research suggested many positive outcomes that benefit students in the partnership relationship such as enhanced metacognitive awareness of learning, improved higher-order thinking skills, increased autonomy and self-regulation capabilities, student engagement, and academic performances. Students participating as partners in a constructivist learning paradigm for meaningful co-creation requires a much deeper level of student involvement throughout the process. Before conducting the co-creation activities, students’ strong willingness to participate, engage, and make contributions will increase the likelihood of the positive outcomes of co-creation. On the other hand, the partnership results of co-creation can be largely constrained by insufficient clarity of the students’ roles and low perceived confidence in their ability to perform in it. Students who are not induced to make a respective contribution are another source of hindrance. Given the potential learning advantages in co-creation, the attitudinal construct of student readiness in student-staff partnership literature is limited. Therefore, this study aimed to explore factors of student readiness for co-creation and simultaneously pilot-tested an inducement factor as a predictor of deep learning. The results of exploratory factor analysis suggested that student readiness for co-creation comprised of two factors namely perceived role clarity and capabilities, and student inducement for motivation. Based upon the contribution-inducement model, this study shed light on the roles of instructional designers and teachers in stimulating students’ readiness for active collaboration for the successful co-creation learning experience.