Working in partnership

Central to the ImpVis project is its strong community all working towards a common goal. This authentic project helps us achieve the partnership relationship that we are founded upon. There are three guiding principles of partnerships that we value particularly, and which set them apart from mere student participation or a student-supervisor style relationships. These are:

1. The partnership is based on mutual respect and draws its strength from equally valuing staff and students' expertise. Members of staff are experts in teaching and their subject-specific domain; students have the expertise of being learners. During the project, the students are likely to develop expertise in coding in Javascript and HTML and possibly design considerations.
2. A partnership means joint ownership of both the development process and the final visualisation. Both staff and student(s) contribute to the decision-making of how to work on the visualisation (e.g. meeting times, how to communicate, when to work), and both also make decisions on the visualisation's look and functionality.
3. The responsibility for the visualisation and its development is shared, but not equal. It is jointly up to the staff and student(s) involved in the partnership to define who is responsible for what precisely, in particular, during the design process. Generally, there is an expectation that the student is responsible for the coding process, and the staff member is responsible for the technical correctness of the final product.

It is not always easy to transition from a supervisor-student style relationship to one of partnership - keeping discussions informal and collaborative usually helps. Most important is the fact that in a true partnership, both sides are invested in the final product, and both sides stand something to gain from their involvement.

Here are some benefits of staff-student partnership that motivated our decision to adopt this approach:

1. For the project: Having students create visualisations gives the collective project an insight into how students learn while having academic staff ensures the academic integrity of produced content.
2. For the staff: Collaboration with students allows staff to reflect on and improve teaching practices. The final product (the visualisation) is usually a valuable enhancement to an instructor's module.
3. For the students: Working as part of this project gives students an opportunity for professional development, it helps them become part of the academic community, and it allows them to get insight into modern teaching practices & educational design.