Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, University of Birmingham
Instructed by Dr. Jack Tsao and Dr. Michael Rivera
Key Takeaways
The Common Core Office facilitated an undergraduate policy consultancy as a co-curricular programme in collaboration with the UoB in the UK, from 21 March to 30 April 2022 (6 weeks). Student teams from UoB’s LANS From Research To Policy II course formulated a policy for a social issue important to the Birmingham area, which involved conducting a research process–articulating a problem, ideating a solution, devising a methodology, collecting data, and analysis, discussion and presentation.
HKU undergraduate students provided in-depth feedback for the UoB student projects about how their projects might be enhanced by additional perspectives from Hong Kong and Asia. As part of this work, HKU students were introduced to social policy analysis, practice applying basic analytical frameworks to case studies, writing a consulting report, and running consulting meetings. HKU students delivered a consulting report and held consulting meetings to help UoB students draft their policy white papers.
Distinctive Features
- Different curriculum and learning outcomes for students from each institution
- Flipped classroom design and peer-to-peer learning model
- Apply consulting skills to real-impact social policy scenarios
- Collaborate with HKU peers to research how specific social problems and solutions are shaped by different social, political, economic, and cultural configurations
| Week 1 | Introduction Expectations, icebreaking and teambuilding exercises with the HKU cohort, discussion of the UoB intended social policies, defining and exploring the problem, organising the groups |
| Week 2 | Contextualising the issue Explore the social issues from UK, HK and international context. |
| Week 3 | Research methods Analyse the proposed research methods and discussion on writing the consulting report |
| Week 4 | Policy template analysis Examine different types of ‘white paper’ social policy templates and how they are written |
| Week 5 | Consulting Meetings Communication skills workshop on how to run a consulting meeting |
| Week 6 | Submission of consulting report and undertake the consulting meetings with the UoB students to give feedback |
Insights for Teaching and Learning
- COIL partnerships can operate independently with limited contact between the students from both institutions but still leverage each side to drive learning
- Minor adjustment to existing courses required to collaborate in COIL partnerships
- Enables the introduction of different international contexts to provide fresh perspectives to existing knowledge domains