ARP

I concluded both the staff and student findings with a short summary of what the highlights were for me as the researcher.

The staff interviews helped me to understand more about the challenges of SSPs, what we want to achieve when setting up and running SSPs and the impact and value that they can create for students. The student survey helped me to understand more about the student experience of undertaking an SSP where there is a contract and IP fee in place and their understanding of managing their IP within the process, I also asked students to reflect on their key takeaways and what they would suggest as an improvement.

Based on carrying out this research I have developed a set of key findings which I have demonstrated on the slides I have prepared for the final ARP presentation on Friday 13th January. Figure 1 and Figure 2 shows a draft of these slides:

After I had written up my key findings I decided that it was important to set some aims for what the future of SSPs could look like. This began as a set of three key aims but turned into more of a manifesto based on the findings from this project. One I had developed the key aims I created some reflective questions that staff could use to support their thinking around each of the aims or manifesto points. Looking at reflective questions in this way is something that I have developed after learning the approach from my IP Education manager Roxanne Peters.

Initial aims for the future of SSPs:

• Aim to ensure that there is a discussion about value in the initial stages of project negotiation with the client
• Aim to ensure that students have a clear understanding of the contract that they are signing and what this means for them and their work
• Aim to ensure that feedback from industry partners an integral part of the SSP process and set key dates for these conversations

Ideas for implementing these aims / manifesto points in practice:

Aim	Implementation idea 1	Implementation idea 2
1. Ensure that there is a discussion about value in the initial stages of project negotiation with the client	B&I staff to be briefed by the IP Education team at UAL on student value within SSPs based on the Flying Tiger and Chatty Feet case studies.	During initial sessions about the SSP contract ask students about their understanding of their value
2. Ensure that students have a clear understanding of the contract that they are signing and what this means for them and their work	Provide students with 2-3 opportunities to read, understand, question and discuss the SSP contract that is presented to them and ensure they are given adequate time for this.	IP Education team to develop a simple one page document that provides students with clear definitions of key terms and diagrams to help them understand assignment and licensing.
3. Ensure that feedback from industry partners an integral part of the SSP process and set key dates for these conversations	Within the initial negotiations develop a feedback plan for how and when feedback will be provided to the students throughout the unit or project.	Unit leaders to co-create a simple table or resource for students to complete following feedback from industry partners to allow them to effectively reflect.

I managed to get 15 students to answer my questionnaire which I was pleased with after I initially struggled to get any students to respond to my email requests. 10 responses were from LCF students and once I had received these, I reached out to a tutor at LCC to see if he could pass on the link to some of his students studying MA animation.  

Analysis on questions about the beginning of an SSP:  

Confidence about contracts was something that I tested through a question about how the students felt about understanding the terms in the contract for their SSP, the average rating was 5.53 out of 10 which I feel is quite low (Figure 1). 3 students were clear that they definitely had an opportunity to ask questions about the contract but 8 students were unsure whether or not they actually had this opportunity. I then went on to ask them about how confident they were understanding how their IP was managed in the SSP and unfortunately this average rating was even lower at 4.80 out of 10 (Figure 2)  

Analysis on questions reflecting on the experiences of the students during the SSP:  

The average rating for how proud students felt of the work they had created out of 10 was 7.47 which is pleasing to see as it would appear that the majority of them are proud of their work. There was only 1 student of the 15 who’s answer was below 5 for this question. However, when asked to rank how important the work was going forwards the average rating was only 6.73 out of 10.  

7 students have used the work created in their SSP in their portfolio and 9 have used it for job or internship applications, it’s great to see that what they have created was useful for their ongoing progression and further work.  

Analysis on the value of SSPs for students:  

Students were asked what they think was the most valuable aspect, experience or highlight of working on the SSP. Some of the answers they gave were as follows (presented in a random order):  

• ‘Collaborating with students from different courses at LCF that I didn’t work with before to brainstorm new ideas for the company’ 
• ‘It was great to work with students that had different background and skills in the business side of fashion not just design.’ 
• ‘I enjoyed working with my team and the external partner team as we were able to learn lots about starting and running a start-up business and I got to be involved with data analysis and business development which is something that I want to be involved with in my career. It was useful to learn about new technologies in fashion from the perspective of brands or companies that are implementing them as often we hear more about the idea/concept side of technologies rather than practicalities.’ 
• ‘I think it was valuable to work on a live animation brief as this is something that I will do when I have graduated.’ 
• ‘This unit was the first time that I had done a live brief so it was great work experience and I enjoyed working with my friends on the project to share skillsets’ 

The students were then asked if they could change one thing about the SSP that they were involved with what would that change be. Their answers were as follows (presented in a random order):  

• ‘I am not sure whether we signed a contract at the beginning but this would have been useful to discuss how we managed the relationship with the company as our team did lots of market research for the brand which would have supported their business development. As it was more research based I didn’t create anything that I could use in my portfolio’ 
• ‘I think it would be good to have more live briefs so that we can present our work to industry on a regular basis during the MA as this will help in getting jobs freelancer afterwards.’ 
• ‘Even though we worked with an external animation company I don’t think that they understood how long it took to create these projects. It was months worth of work for each person in the group and I think we were paid less than half of what we would be paid in industry for the same project. I know that I am a student but I have industry experience and am undertaking an MA, we produced industry standard work and should have been paid a fair amount for this high level of work for the client. I think we should have a meeting with our course leader at the beginning of the project to negotiate our fees like if we were freelancers in industry to make sure that the project outcomes and budget are clear from the beginning.’ 

Surprisingly many of the answers given for question 16 were focused on contracts and understanding IP, there were a few queries about questions that I had asked earlier in the questionnaire which related to IP. I wonder if this was due to their lack of understanding of IP which was in some ways the main focus of the questionnaire or whether the questions about IP led them towards focusing on this for their ‘what would you change’ answers. It is an interesting consideration in hindsight, maybe reordering the questions might have changed the answers given?  

For full answers to these questions please refer to attached Excel document below. The participant places have been randomised and the question asking them for a 4 digit number in order to withdraw in the future if needed has been removed for the purpose of anonymising this research.  

Example 1: LCF X Flying Tiger

Working with a Programme Director at the Fashion Business School and a representative from the Business and Innovation team at LCF (both of whom I will keep anonymous) I was able to research more about the LCF collaboration with Flying Tiger the brand. The project was a live brief developed for BA Fashion Buying and Merchandising Year 2 as part of their Retail Concept Development and Product Management unit. The students were asked within their group to provide a robust business case for a new range for the brand Flying Tiger through developing a business development report and supporting visual material.

The winning group impressed the team from Flying Tiger so much that they were asked to assign (transfer the IP in their work) to Flying Tiger for a fee to see their work produced and sold in stores. Each student was paid £500 for the IP of the 5 outfit designs and accompanying accessory designs. After looking through the high level of design and development involved in the project and understanding exactly what Flying Tiger was able to access after the IP assignment I was extremely surprised to see that the students were only paid a small sum of money.

The staff team involved in the project were able to tell me more about what they believe the students to have gained from the project alongside the money which included team work development, industry ready skills such as business report and mock up designs as well as receiving excellent industry feedback to help develop their project further. You can read more about the Flying Tiger project within the raw data collected from Participants 3 and 4.

Figure 2: Some examples of the students dress up outfit designs from the LCF X Flying Tiger collaboration available at flyingtiger.com.

Example 2: NJAS X Chatty Feet

NJAS stands for Not Just a Shop. NJAS is based at HH campus and sells artwork, fashion and gifts designed and created by UAL students and graduates. I have created this short case study based on an email conversation that I had with 2 members of UAL Careers and Employability about their experience in creating a new collaboration for students with the sock brand Chatty Feet. Due to the amount of confidential information including names, contact details and discussion of exact fees I was not given permission to reproduce the email chain for the purpose of illustrating the content for my PgCert.

The staff members told me more about the initial conversations that they had with the brand about organising a collaboration for students to win the chance to design a pair of socks that would be sold on the Chatty Feet website and with their physical stockists. The brand was quite transparent and explained how much they would usually pay for the design which involved assignment of the designers IP. This assignment meant that the creator couldn’t use the design for anything else such as their own products or a collaboration with a different company and there was no time line attached such as a limited edition sock.

I was pleased that the staff members reached out to me because they were concerned that the agreement they were discussing didn’t seem fair to the students. One of the staff members said ‘If the design is good enough it’s irrelevant that they’re students so I’m not okay with the logic to pay them less, I don’t want to under-value their work!‘. It was great to hear them being able to see the value of the students work. I think that it’s really important that we teach students about value and how to ensure that they are valued as creators and their work is valued fairly by others both at UAL and in industry. If we treat them as ‘just students’ and undervalue their work due to their student status then we are not preparing them effectively for industry.

There is lots of extant literature that focuses on the skills that students develop from working on live brief such as Rochon (2022) and Gundala, Singh and Cochran (2018). However, I feel there is a key gap in this which relates to understanding your value as a creative within your respective industry and how this informs your later practice. There are lots of mentions of things such as developing team work, listening skills, collaboration ability and ensuring students are learning skills they need for industry but crucially this is missing a discussion about fees and negotiation of these fees.

Reference list:

• Gundala, R. R., Singh, M. and Cochran, T. K. (2018) ‘Perceptions of Integrated Experiential Learning of Graduate Marketing Students’, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(2), pp. 74–89. 
• Rochon, R. (2022) Live brief projects in higher education: a contexualised examination and staff perceptions of experiential learning. Doctoral thesis, Buckinghamshire New University. Available at: https://bucks.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/18506/ (Accessed on 3^rd January 2022). 

Analysis process:

I initially thought that I was going to try to secure 6+ interviews with staff members in which case I felt comfortable and confident with using thematic analysis and coding to look at my findings and begin to draw out key categories. However, when I spoke to Tim Stephens in the final tutorial in December I updated him with the number of expected staff interviews and he suggested that I read into hermeneutics as thematic analysis is more suited to higher number of interviewees. I found out that hermeneutics is the study of interpretation and I began to explore hermeneutics as a research approach. I felt that the purpose of hermeneutics which is human understanding of what people say and do and why seemed like a good fit for my research and I would try to explore this research method along side the initial colour coding analysis that I wanted to use.

I began by first checking my transcripts to ensure that Microsoft Teams had corrected picked up both my words and the words of my participants by re-listening to the interviews and reading the transcript as I went along. I was able to make any required edits reasonably swiftly. Then I set about breaking down what was contained in the transcripts into key topics. This was the first stage of my colour code analysis that would help me gather information from all of the participants for analysis. Once I had gathered this I added the key elements and summaries to post-it notes on a Miro board shown in Figure 1.

Once I had done the sorting of this raw data I began to look at how I could code this data into more summarises rather than the pretty lengthy quotes that I had begun with. In previous research I have always relied on Saldana (2021) to support with the coding process and on reflection I think that I went slightly ‘off piste’ with my approach this time by sorting by topic prior to beginning any coding. I didn’t feel that I have approach this piece of research with my usual rigour but I still feel that I have been able to draw out some great findings. I’m not sure why I lost my usual rigour but it may be due to the short time I had to develop this project and managing many other projects at the same time from my different roles at UAL. However, I believe that it’s useful I am able to reflect on this as it demonstrates that I am aware of what has happened during this piece of research and what I would change for the future to make positive improvements.

My second stage involved sorting through lots of the data that I had collated the simplfying it through codes in order to make it easier to see themes arising from the different interviews. The post-it notes on the left hand side are the sub-codes or potentially future categories as I begin to work through all of the data. I also showed key links between the different sub-codes using arrows as demonstrated below. An example of this is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: An analysis of the codes related to the topic of ‘value’ the green colour of the post-its shown here aligns with the green highlighted sections on the transcripts.

After I had completed this initial coding I was able to look at all of the different codes that I had compiled through different topics and bring them together to sort into an order which I felt made sense with what I had begun to gather, as shown in Figure 3. As I worked through this I was really pleased with how the different topics were coming together to provide nice summaries and conclusions from the key data. I also kept track of any key quotes that I might want to present as part of my findings directly as this was an important way of demonstrating the impact of this project.

Once I had done this sorting I began to try to visualise my data in a different way and create some code trees that helped me to think about the key categories deriving from my data. At this point I did consider that I was moving strongly away from the alternative research methods that Tim Stephens had pointed me in the direction of during the last tutorial such as hermeneutics and leaning into my experience of coding and gathering data in this way. However, the reason that I decided to stick with deriving categories from my codes was that I felt this a really good way of supporting my action research intervention that Frederico had reminded me of during the ethical enquiry form feedback. In Figure 3 I have shown an example of the code trees that I began to develop.

Key quotes from staff interviews:

Thoughts on values –

• “…because there’s no kind of monetary value, it doesn’t mean there’s no value at all”
• “The client was made aware of the value of the students’ work, their innovative and rich ideas, these creatives, taste makers and influencers are future practitioners in industry”
• “The value is far-reaching and I think that’s really what’s important”

Thoughts on limitations and challenges of SSPs –

• “It also skews the perception of the salary a student should receive, as they do it for a cheap flat fee due to their student status“
• “had a couple of issues where even when we’ve tried to explain a little bit, especially in the sense that we say it’s quite a mutual partnership that we’re trying to engage with because it’s not got any monies involved at the moment, it’s more about value”
• “if you were to look at a disadvantage from the academics point of view, which is exactly what you’ve just touched upon, it’s a huge amount of administrative. I mean, the legal side is it’s been heavy”
• “quite difficult to see and to to realize the concept that this academic piece of work. Needs to achieve the learning outcomes, but yet also there’s what the industry would actually like to see, which is then the two have to sit hand in hand”

Overall summaries from staff interviews are shown in the table in Figure 5.

Reference list:

• Saldana, J. (2021) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Sage: London.
• McCaffrey, G., Raffin-Bouchal, S., Moules. N. (2012) Hermeneutics as Research Approach: A Reappraisal. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/160940691201100303 (accessed on: 13th December 2022).

Many of the questions developed for the questionnaire were developed from the work on Rochon, 2022 and Gundala, Singh and Cochran, 2018. Both pieces of research involved staff and student participation from those involved in experiential live brief projects within a higher education setting. Gundala et al., was a project more focused on staff perspectives which supported the development of my interview questions.  

There was work to be done in selecting my participants and I began this by reaching out to the Business and Innovation team at LCF as I had a close connection there. My contact was asked to contact all staff who have completed an SSP since January 2022 to ask whether they would like to be include in the interview sample for my ARP. The idea was that a selection of 5-8 course or unit leaders from London College of Fashion will be purposively sampled based on the response to the initial enquiry email and the following selection criteria. The staff participation selection criteria which was sent to the B&I team at LCF was based on the following criteria to ensure that the most relevant members of staff were recruited:  

1. Has your course or unit carried out an SSP since January 2022?  

2. Did your students sign a contract to agree to their involvement in the SSP?  

3. Did this SSP contract involve assigning or licensing student intellectual property?  

Once I had sent this email to the B&I team I set about brainstorming some interview questions for staff which was mostly based on the research and reading I was doing to develop my literature review for the project. You can see an outline of my initial Miro board brainstorm in Figure 1:  

Once I’d completed an initial draft I worked on organising these questions into a more specific order and I settled on thinking about before, during and after going through the process of organising and running an SSP. This seemed like a logical approach that would work for a staff member reflecting on their project and is the same approach used by Gundala et al in their staff facing project (2018). Once I had worked through these questions and organising them into an order I cut out some of the questions that were less relevant or slightly repetitive as I didn’t have a huge amount of time to gather data from the interviews. In the screenshot in Figure 2 I have shown a developed order and cut down version of the interview framework.  

Reference list:

• Alvesson, M. (2012) Views on Interviews: A Skeptical review. In Interpreting Interviews. London: Sage. 
• Bradbury, H. (ed.) (2015) The SAGE handbook of action research [electronic resource], Los Angeles: SAGE.  
• Gundala, R. R., Singh, M. and Cochran, T. K. (2018) ‘Perceptions of Integrated Experiential Learning of Graduate Marketing Students’, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(2), pp. 74–89. 
• Rochon, R. (2022) Live brief projects in higher education: a contextualised examination and staff perceptions of experiential learning. Doctoral thesis, Buckinghamshire New University. Available at: https://bucks.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/18506/ (Accessed on 3^rd January 2022).  

Within the research I intend to carry out for this project it is important to ensure that I have the representative voice of all of the different parties involved in an SSP. If I were not limited by time then it would be great to hear from students, SSP unit leaders at UAL, external organisations (clients) and from the UAL Business and Innovation team. However, having mapped out the time involved in speaking with each of these groups I decided that it would be more manageable to settle on hearing from students and staff involved in SSPs since January 2022.  

As surveys are something that is relatively new to me (I’m more traditionally a qualitative researcher) I ensured to read through Converse and Presser’s (2011) text on writing survey questions. I did of course make reference to the classic Saunders et al (2019) but as that text is more aimed at business students so I referred to Kara (2015) for an alternative perspective on creative research methods.  

Staff research plan:  

1. Reach out to the Business and Innovation teams at LCF and CSM through my connections  

2. Ask for a list of unit or course leaders who have run an SSP in 2021/22 academic year  

3. Reach out to the unit or course leaders on the list received from B&I team  

4. Book in interview times with staff members who have responded to initial call out 

5. Carry out interviews with staff members who confirmed a time for interview  

6. Transcribe and colour code then analyse findings to inform student survey.  

Student research plan:  

1. After carrying out the staff interviews develop the survey questions based on findings 

2. Test the sense and relevance of the student survey with 2 students to ensure it works  

3. Reach out to the staff who took part in the interviews to send survey to their students  

4. Send out a reminder to complete the survey to staff to share with their students  

5. Analyse findings from student survey and gather key quotes for presentation. 

As I work through the initial stages of my staff research plan I am beginning to struggle with recruitment of participants. This seems to be for two main reasons 1) lack of time and 2) staff being unsure about sharing their experience of SSPs. I have begun to record and keep track of why staff members are saying no to getting involved in the project as this will support further reflections and how to take my action research further in the future.  

Reference list:  

• Converse, J. M., Presser, S. (2011). Survey questions: handcrafting the standardized questionnaire. Thousand Oaks: Sage. https://methods-sagepub- com.arts.idm.oclc.org/book/survey-questions/n3.xml  
• Kara, H. (2015) Creative research methods in the Social Sciences: A practical guide. [electronic resource]. Bristol: Policy Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=6193498  

Theme 1 – Definitions:  

When I began to look at extant literature on the topic of Sponsored Student Projects (SSPs) I initially had an issue with finding work that had the focus that I needed to support and develop my thinking. So I had to take a step back to look at what we meant by the term ‘Sponsored Student Project’ at UAL and terms that might be used by other higher education institutions in order to widen my searches. From my research I found that most authors use the terms ‘live brief’ and/ or ‘experiential learning’ so I build my reading lists based on these key terms.  

Rochon outlines that there is limited material published on the use of live briefs in higher education and a lack of linking these projects to experiential learning theories which is how she developed the research gap for her doctoral thesis (2022).  

Theme 2 – Student and staff perceptions on live briefs:  

Dewey was the first to develop experiential learning theory (1938) which was later popularised by Kolb and Fry (1974). Both authors recognised that the impact from experience-based learning was far greater than merely ‘a cognitive event’ (Kolb, 1984). From research with both staff and students involved in SSPs found that ‘as well as showing changes to values and attitudes, students and staff reported that they appreciated the authenticity of experiential learning to develop students’ soft skills, including teamwork.’ (Rochon, 2022). 

Much of the academic literature published related to Sponsored Student Projects (or similarly named projects that revolve around a live brief and involved external partners) looks at staff and student perceptions which is what informed my decision to ensure that both voices were represented in my action research. Many of the findings from these reports supported that ‘experiential learning using live briefs, carefully implemented, affords rich opportunities for learning that students and staff see as valuable.’ (Rochon, 2022).  

Theme 3 – Skill development:  

A range of studies support that live breifs and experiential learning supports the development of a range of soft skills such as team work and communication (Sherman and Botkydis, 2020; Kim 2019). An interesting findings that came up in several studies was the concept of resilience and students increased levels of ‘enjoyment, satisfaction and self-confidence’ in overcoming challenges (Sherman and Botkydis, 2020, p.84).  

Gundala, Singh and Cochran (2018) focus on the benefits of live briefs for staff and organisations as well as just the students which appear to be the focus of most other papers. They outline that ‘participating as part of experiential learning activities is a means of keeping academia abreast of competencies and skills for employers’ and enhance curriculum development. Sebby and Brown (2010) further this by discussing that these projects can strengthen the academic community and benefit universities from increased industry connections.  

Initial ideas around a research gap:

Within the extant literature there is clear evidence of the value of SSPs for both students and staff but I felt that there was a clear research gap in evidencing the value created for students and what role a financial element plays in this. There seems to be much discussion about values such as teamwork, confidence and learning from industry experience. However, there is little to know link between SSPs or live briefs and the financial element which seems to play such a crucial part of how SSPs are organised and managed at UAL. From the event that I attended at the LCF Fashion Business School away day in September I learned of the continued push towards securing industry partners with budget to pay for students IP and pay for use of the school logo. I felt that the clear research gap from existing literature and what I had learned from my experiences as an Associate Lecturer I was in a strong position to begin to pitch a project on improving the understanding of value (whether that financial or otherwise) within an SSP.

Reference list:

• Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and education. Touchstone. New York: Simon and Schuster. 
• Gundala, R. R., Singh, M. and Cochran, T. K. (2018) ‘Perceptions of Integrated Experiential Learning of Graduate Marketing Students’, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(2), pp. 74–89. 
• Kim, O. D. T. (2019) ‘Organizing experiential learning activities for development of core competences of technical students in Vietnam’, Universal Journal of Educational Research, 7(1), pp. 230–238. doi: 10.13189/ujer.2019.070129. 
• Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential learning : experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hill. 
• Kolb, D. A. and Fry, R. E. (1974) Toward an applied theory of experiential learning, Theories of Group Process. Boston: M.I.T. Alfred Sloan School of Management.  
• Rochon, R. (2022) Live brief projects in higher education: a contexualised examination and staff perceptions of experiential learning. Doctoral thesis, Buckinghamshire New University. Available at: https://bucks.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/18506/ (Accessed on 3^rd January 2022). 
• Sebby, A. G. and Brown, C. (2020) ‘Experiential learning in hospitality management curriculum: Case study in rural southeast U.S.’, Research in Higher Education Journal, 38, pp. 1–10.  
• Sherman, P. and Botkydis, O. (2020) ‘Framing undergraduate perpectives on experiential learning within soka education theory’, IAFOR Journal of Education, 8(1), pp. 41–59.