A case study to demonstrate the impact of the HEA's Teaching Development Grant programme.
There is an essential and growing demand for HEIs to increase the focus on employability skills. But teaching staff may not always be in the best place or equipped with the time and resources to focus on this area and so employability skills are likely to present a major challenge for HEIs over the coming years. Student demand for increased engagement in their own learning small-group and interactive teaching that teaches them skills employers want has led the University of St Andrews to engage Biology students across different year groups in creating and implementing employability-themed tutorials.
The University has applied for a TDG grant to enable them to recruit students to develop trial and evaluate a set of high quality dynamic and interactive tutorials to increase students employability skills and tutors' ability to deliver them. As the time and costs to institutions to develop such materials can be prohibitive the University will involve the student population in developing and maintaining them from feedback over time so that they meet the changing needs of students and employers. The resources will be made freely available to other HEIs and FECs online and through dissemination enable them to establish similar programmes.
