Student Engagement in Knowledge Exchange
The Office for Students and Research England launched the £10m ‘Student Engagement in Knowledge Exchange’ competition to develop the evidence base on the nature of, and benefits from, student engagement in knowledge exchange activities. The competition will support 20 projects led by Higher Education providers across England, helping to develop and share understanding of effective practice in student engagement, and to inform on-going knowledge exchange policy and investment.
SQW has been appointed to conduct an evaluation of the competition. The broad aims of the evaluation are:
- Identifying, extracting, interrogating and evaluating project-level and programme-level evidence on the benefits to students and external partners of engaging in knowledge exchange activities.
- Working with projects to ensure the quality and effectiveness of project-level monitoring and evaluation, so that robust evidence of benefits and effective practice is available to the higher education sector and wider industrial groups and communities.
- Presenting the learning in different ways to inform the higher education sector, share good practice, and provide evidence to support new partnerships and interventions.
Our approach for this evaluation combines an independent evaluation of the processes, including detailed case studies, meta-evaluation of projects’ self-evaluation reports and the utilisation of implementation science, with the provision of monitoring and evaluation support for each of the funded projects including quality assurance of their evaluation plans and the implementation of an online learning platform.
The work will involve close engagement with the commissioning team at Office for Students and the funded projects throughout the delivery period to help design and to facilitate project learning.
