Projects 2026-27

Project lead: Kevin Haines

Project team: Christie Cabral, Gosia Drewniok, Laura Yiqing Wang, Mark Hilton, Pippa Whitton and Will Bryson

Project summary:  This project focuses on collaborative development and implementation of eLearning training for STEM teachers, with a focus on supporting diverse groups of students. Taking a ‘students as partners’ approach, this project will integrate the CoCreate materials into our Bristol processes for supporting STEM lecturers in their work with diverse groups of students, both international and home. CoCreate Bristol aims to partner STEM students and lecturers in the integration and use of the resources produced by the CoCreate project. This will result in a unique Bristol interpretation of these materials that will equip STEM teachers with inclusive strategies for teaching transferable skills. In so doing, this BILT project would build a partnership at UoB that focuses on embedding the results of the CoCreate project into CPD practices. The project also builds on the work of the BILT RISE project, but extends this work from ‘top tips’ to the provision of resources, while also focusing specifically on STEM contexts.

...Lessons from MSc Finance and Investment at Mumbai Enterprise Campus (MEC)

Project lead: Linh Tran

Project summary: The launch of MSc Finance and Investment at MEC provides a timely opportunity to examine how Bristol's educational principles for transnational education are realised in the student learning journey of a one-year UK postgraduate programme. This Programme Director-led evaluation and curriculum-mapping study uses MSc Finance and Investment as an early taught postgraduate case for examining contextualisation within alignment. The project aims to:

• Map key elements of where and how active-learning opportunities, such as applied tasks, problem-solving, structured participation and formative feedback, are designed and signposted across the MSc Finance and Investment learning journey at MEC.
• Evaluate how students experience early transition into a Bristol taught postgraduate programme, including participation, formative feedback, applied learning, use of the VLE where relevant and cohort belonging.
• Identify how permitted contextualisation of examples, case studies and data can support local relevance while maintaining Bristol curriculum alignment, intended learning outcomes and academic standards.
• Produce actionable tools and design principles intended to support future taught postgraduate and MSc programmes at MEC and Bristol.

Project lead: Nilu Ahmed

Project team: Shokraneh Moghadam

Project summary: Actor-based teaching using simulated patients is widely established across dental, medical, veterinary, and other health professions education programmes. Actor simulated patients provide learners with opportunities to practise communication, clinical reasoning, and patient-centred care within realistic but controlled environments. However, the majority of actor recruitment processes rely on professional registered actors who are often drawn from relatively homogeneous backgrounds and may not fully reflect the diversity of the communities served by healthcare professionals. The project will engage students as co-researchers across design and analysis, and recruit and train local community members to act as simulated patients within communication skills teaching in the Dental School. Using a comparative design, student feedback, learner experience, and selected learning outcomes will be evaluated against sessions delivered using professional actors. The study will explore whether community actors enhance authenticity, cultural responsiveness, student engagement, and learning, while also identifying potential challenges and training requirements.

Project lead: Dave Lawson

Project team: Fiona Hartley

Project summary: There is growing recognition that students’ learning is shaped not only by what is taught, but by whose knowledge, experience and expertise are made visible through teaching. Improving the diversity of representation in curricula can support belonging, widen students’ understanding of their discipline, and help all students engage more critically with how knowledge is produced, valued and applied. This project builds on previous School of Biological Sciences work, including BILT-funded student partner projects on the demographics of researchers represented in taught materials, student-led decolonisation and diversification projects, and more recent student-staff curriculum co-creation work. This new project for 2026-27 focuses specifically on practical approaches to improving representation in taught content, while recognising that this may include engagement with global perspectives, indigenous knowledge systems, colonial histories, and previously undervalued forms of knowledge.

Project leads: Bethan Stacey and Naader Abbasi

Project team: Jo Hartland, Juliet Brown and Rohin Athavale

Project summary: Clinical examination is a fundamental component of undergraduate medical education, underpinning safe and effective patient care. High-quality learning requires a clear understanding of standardised examination of body systems (e.g. cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological) alongside the ability to apply these skills flexibly in real-world contexts. Learning how to adapt standardised clinical examinations with compassion and sensitivity aligns with regulatory guidance and moves the learner from theoretical classroom application to real world working. This project focuses on developing six high-quality, standardised clinical examination videos aligned with the Bristol Medical School curriculum, and will then pilot resources demonstrating how examination approaches can be adapted to meet diverse patient needs, informed by student and faculty evaluation.

Project lead: Mark France 

Project summary: With the move to the new campus, this project will work alongside further training and resources to support colleagues working in the new building to gather data that helps us better understand the experience of both academic staff and students working and learning in the new space. This project will help to develop skills and expertise in colleagues that will equip them to teach more effectively in the new building, by understanding at a granular level how they are experiencing the space over time, and adapting their curricula and teaching style accordingly. The study will be used to develop models of best practice that build on the expertise gained and mitigate any problems or difficulties that have arisen during it’s first year in operation.  It will also build on existing scholarship on learning and teaching in the round to theorise how teachers respond to such spaces, and students experience them.

Project lead: Claire O'Neill

Project team: Anne O’Brien and Robin Klimecki

Project summary: This project aims to investigate the pedagogical opportunities and challenges presented by the new lecture theatre in the round at the Temple Quarter Enterprise campus. In particular, interrogating the conditions under which the new space facilitates active and inclusive teaching and learning, and identify the factors that may enable or constrain it. The project will: explore student experiences of learning in the round, explore staff perceptions of teaching in the round and make recommendations for practice and contributions to scholarship.

Project lead: Paul Hendrie

Project summary: This project will bring together academics from different schools, student partners and a BILT critical friend to identify, test and refine practical approache to using and avoding AI in teaching and learning. It will begin by mapping examples from Bristol and the wider sector, including cases where AI use is helpful and cases where avoiding AI is pedagogically stronger. Students will contribute views on where AI supports learning, where it risks short-cutting learning, and what kinds of support feel inclusive and useful. The team will then co-develop and test unit-specific activities for active learning: tasks, resources, simulations, artefacts, and AI-free alternatives. Through iterative design and evaluation, the project will produce a usable framework for AI-informed active learning, together with shareable activity 'recipes', examples and workshop materials. The aim is not to promote AI use for its own sake, but to develop evidence-informed, human-centred pedagogies that help staff make better design decisions.

Project lead: Sahar Basiri Esfahani

Project summary: This project will investigate how AI influences scientific reasoning within taught physics contexts. It will design and evaluate AI-aware assessment activities that explicitly focus on reasoning processes rather than solely final answers. Students will be encouraged to reflect on how AI shaped their thinking, identify where they accepted, modified or challenged AI-generated outputs, and evaluate the quality of their own reasoning. The project will generate evidence-based recommendations for assessment design in science and contribute practical examples of AI-aware assessment that can be adapted across STEM disciplines. By focusing on scientific reasoning rather than AI detection, the project seeks to support the development of graduates who can use AI critically, effectively and responsibly in future scientific and professional practice.  

Project lead: Rich Pyle

Project team: Joel Ross

Project summary: This project aims to evaluate and refine the integration of GenAI within ECMDA, building directly on the previous two years of iterative implementation. The primary aim is to understand whether current interventions are achieving their intended educational goals: developing students’ critical thinking skills and fostering effective, reflective use of AI and consider how this could be done more effectively. The project is guided by three research questions:

• How are students currently interacting with the unit’s AI-generated feedback?
• To what extent do the current activities develop critical thinking and AI literacy?
• What improvements/additions could better leverage GenAI within the unit

The student partner on this project will codesign adaptation of existing GenAI active learning interventions. Structured focus groups, designed by the student partner, will be run to capture nuanced student perspectives that are not accessible through surveys. These insights will support evidence-based refinement of the pedagogical design and technical provision of GenAI tools. More broadly, the project aims to contribute to wider sector understanding of how GenAI can be effectively integrated into large-scale, active-learning environments to support core academic skills development.

...Redesigning Assessment for Responsible use of gen AI in research in Dental Education

Project lead: Ffion Jones

Project team: David Dymock

Project summary: This project aims to evaluate the impact of an AI-integrated assessment on dental students’ AI literacy, attitudes towards GenAI, and perceived ability to critically evaluate AI-generated information. Specifically, it will explore whether participation in the redesigned Year 3 sustainability conference assessment influences students’ confidence in using GenAI tools, their understanding of the strengths and limitations of LLMs, and their self-reported critical evaluation skills. It will also examine how students currently use GenAI in their academic lives, and whether these patterns change following engagement with the assessment.

Project lead: Ros Death

Project team: Becky Collins, Eilidh Sligo and Maria Fannin

Project summary: Building on the Bristol MySkills Framework this project will develop a programme-level evidence base to make discipline-specific employability skills explicit, evidenced, and externally meaningful. In doing so, it will complement—not replicate —existing provision by translating embedded learning into clearly demonstrable outcomes. The project will focus on Year 2, Geographical Sciences students, using a mixed-methods approach to explore how students recognise and interpret the skills they develop through their programme. These insights will inform the design of a targeted framework to support staff in making employability skills more visible and consistently signposted within the curriculum. The overarching aim is to enable students to confidently evidence and communicate their skills using concrete examples in CVs, applications, and interviews. By strengthening both student articulation and staff practice, the project will enhance engagement with MySkills and contribute to improved student confidence, NSS outcomes, and graduate employability.

Project lead: Fiona Hartley

Project team: Sara Navid

Project summary: This project intends to explore the assessments within an Economics programme to establish which skills are being developed throughout the course of the degree. The aim of this project will be to evaluate how assessment tasks are supporting students to develop employability skills that they can demonstrate in their search for jobs in an Economics programme.

...an experiential, multimodal, scaffolded act.

Project lead: Gian Lorenzo Spisso

Project team: Kathleen Burrows, Steve Cole, Tim Worth and Yani Berdeni

Project summary: This project will engage students to co-design an escape room type activity where participating students from various faculties will solve coding-related puzzles with the support of AI which they will be asked to critically engage with. The activity is to be embedded within classroom time of a variety of faculties. This experiential, scaffolded format requires students to critically interrogate AI-generated in collaboration with peers, it confronts the illusion of knowledge by creating genuine engagement rather than passive acceptance, and confronts the illusion of safety by training students to question, rather than assume, the correctness and security of AI output - while embedding the practical, course-specific AI literacy that both students and the sector have called for.

...a Cross-Sectional Study Across Year Groups at the University of Bristol Business School

Project lead: Akinyo Ola

Project team: Hua Jin, Kellys Sikabbwele and Marios Kremantzis

Project summary: A pilot at the Business School embedded live charity projects into a Master’s-level Project Management (MGRCM0046) unit, finding improved engagement, motivation and satisfaction; however, the study did not extend to undergraduates or compare this approach against other authentic assessment types. This research aligns with Bristol Business School's strategic aim to formalise group assessment practice and build upon previous BILT research and pilot studies. It aims to compare student experience of authentic assessment (embedded or stimulated) across Years 1–3 and Master's level, and to design an Authentic Group Assessment Framework for the University of Bristol Business School, with potential to scale University-wide.

...through the implementation and evaluation of a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) partnership with a School in the Philippines.

Project lead: Polly Barr

Project summary: The primary aim of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) partnership within a core Psychological Research Methods unit. By integrating structured collaboration between students at the University of Bristol and a partner university in the Philippines, the project seeks to extend an existing authentic research experience to include meaningful international and intercultural engagement. A second aim is to enhance students’ development of future-facing skills that are increasingly important in both academic and professional contexts. These include intercultural competence, digital collaboration, communication across cultures, project management, teamwork, and critical thinking. Through engagement in a shared research project, students will gain first-hand experience of conducting research within a multicultural and geographically distributed team.

Project lead: Satadru Mukherjee

Project summary: The project will review the prevalence of groupwork assessments, oral assessments in the University of Bristol across all UG programs. This will inform us on the varied forms of group work, oral assessments, where these assessments sit in a program, their ILOs. This research will also inform the scope of these assessments, their contributions to future skills development and connections to professional development. The project will further engage with a comprehensive review of the recent literature on these topics and collate best practices of teamworking and oral assessments used in universities, gathering evidence from different perspectives to showcase how such practices have been instrumental in shaping and elevating student’s professional competencies.

Project lead: Kathleen Burrows 

Project team: Catriona Johnson and Gian Lorenzo

Project summary: The Study Skills online resource on Group Work is very well used with over 1000 students accessing the resource each year. This project aims to empower all students, both UG and PG, to better participate in diverse teams by bringing a multicultural and linguistic focus to the existing teamwork resources. It will embed skills training around multicultural group work into units and enhance students’ ability to ‘Work well with others’ and ‘work well across communities’.

Project lead: Shan Hua

Project summary: This project aims to design, pilot and evaluate an AI-enabled verbal conversation assistant to support students on the International Corporate Finance unit in developing discipline-specific oral communication skills. The assistant will provide structured opportunities for students to practise explaining financial concepts, interpreting corporate finance decisions, and discussing international financial issues using appropriate technical terminology and professional English. The project aims to embed communication skills development within the curriculum of a specific unit, with potential to inform wider programme-level curriculum design. It will support students, particularly international students, to build confidence in listening comprehension and verbal communication, make their subject knowledge more visible, and strengthen their ability to articulate complex financial reasoning in academic and professional contexts. By integrating communication practice into disciplinary learning, the project will enhance students’ language capability in the relevant field, support future skills development, and improve employability by helping students prepare for interviews, workplace discussions, presentations and roles in international organisations.    

Project lead: Jo Rose

Project summary: This project aims to establish a sustainable, cross-university network of staff from across UoB, who are developing and delivering interdisciplinary education, in order to develop shared understanding and enhance practice. The network will:

• Provide a structured forum for staff to critically explore different models of interdisciplinary teaching (e.g. integrative, problem-based, third-space approaches)
• Facilitate dialogue on curriculum design, including how interdisciplinary approaches shape learning outcomes related to knowing, doing and being
• Support participants in reflecting on their roles and identities as interdisciplinary educators
• Enable sharing of practice, challenges, and strategies across disciplines.

The longer-term aim is to build a community of practice that supports ongoing innovation in interdisciplinary curriculum design across the University.  

Project lead: Kristopher Magee

Project team: Alison Keighley and Amanda Hughes

Project summary: This project aims to make the existing alumni skills survey universally applicable to all degrees, using branching logic and framing so graduates of any degree programme can complete it. It aims to extend the survey, and the response data it generates, beyond Psychology, initially to Public Health and Epidemiology alumni, with scope to include further undergraduate and taught-postgraduate programmes across the Medical School as partners opt in, and to widen its reach to more postgraduate-taught and international alumni. A central aim is to build a richer, cross-disciplinary dataset of how graduates develop and use the 27 Bristol Skills Profile skills, with the potential to explore in future which skills transfer widely and which are more discipline-specific. The project also aims to turn responses into student-facing careers and skills profiles and short, lecture-ready examples that teaching staff can embed in their units. The impact of these profiles on students will be measured directly, assessing how far they help students recognise, value and articulate the skills their degree develops. Finally, it aims to establish a tested, reusable template so the approach can scale sustainably across the faculty and University.

Project lead: Fatima Lopez Castellanos and Kellys Sikabbwele

Project summary: The project aims to support the development of systems thinking as a competence in postgraduate students in the unit Sustainability and Ethics in Global Supply Chains. To do so, the project seeks to understand:

• How the learning activities and assessment tasks design effectively contribute towards ST competency development in the unit.
• How student engagement with GenAI shapes the development of ST competence in responsible management education.
• To develop learning activities that leverage GenAI for the development of ST competency.

Project lead: Bethan Hawley

Project team: James Lepoittevin

Project summary: This project will develop a personalised digital reflection tool that enables students to input their learning behaviours and receive tailored feedback and actionable suggestions. By linking advice directly to individual student input, the tool supports students to actively engage with and apply more effective strategies, rather than passively receiving guidance. The project will involve student partners from IFP Medicine, IFP Dentistry, and Year 1 MB ChB, supporting co-creation across different early-stage learner groups. In the longer term, the prototype could be extended to integrate with tools such as the Bristol Skills Profile or formative assessment trackers, supporting students to connect study behaviours, skills development, and academic progress over time. The tool will also include signposting to university wellbeing support, ensuring students are supported holistically.