Open SU have won a national poster competition, organised by RAISE (Researching, Advancing, and Inspiring Student Engagement).
RAISE is a worldwide network of staff and students in higher education who work or have an interest in the research and promotion of student engagement, so this award is a great showcase of the incredible work of our volunteers and staff in our Hedgehog Friendly Campus work and our Environment and Sustainability Working Group.
Our Sustainability Representative, Jethro Tieman, and Projects Officer, Ciara Linehan, entered the compeition on behalf of Open SU. Take a look at their poster entry:
The meaning behind the poster
The poster explores the unique challenges and opportunities we face in connecting with students at The Open University – all of whom are distance learners (apart from a small number of postgraduates). We try to engage with our students in a variety of ways to get them involved in our sustainability events and initiatives, most of which you can see in the poster.
Being one of the only entirely remote universities in the UK, we have a unique challenge in trying to engage students in sustainability. As we know, sustainability spans a wide range of areas, including social, political and environmental. And we find that students tend to get motivation to be sustainable from seeing these elements lacking in their own communities.
Where we struggle at The Open University and Open SU is that students do not live in the immediate vicinity and might never visit us on campus. This creates a difficult base for trying to engage students in sustainability initiatives, and improvements on our campus and within the University as a whole. This poster demonstrates how we have tried to overcome this disadvantage; how we attempt to bridge the gap and engage remote students in sustainability.
Engaging remote students with sustainability
It's important to recognise that a portion of our students prefer online events to in-person and vice versa. So we have tried to cater to both in arranging sustainability events and campaigns for OU students, providing remote opportunities and in-person ones too. In the top left corner, you can see our Welcome Week session for students where our Grounds team presented on nature on campus. There was also an opportunity for students to engage with our Environmental Sustainability Society on campus at the in-person fair (you can see the picture at the top).
From giving a virtual tour in the autumn, this summer we invited students to see the campus for themselves. We organised a free in-person event that included not one but two tours of campus with a sustainability focus – one exploring biodiversity and one exploring the University's living roof project that captures carbon and improves water retention.
For an initiative called Hedgehog Friendly Campus, SU staff planted hedgehog-friendly species on the campus grounds, and then at the in-person event students were invited to a class to learn how to propagate their own plants at home.
Again, to ensure we cater for students online, we have volunteers sharing articles all the time on topics like litter picking, forest bathing, what it was like to visit the living roof, and how to upcycle in the garden. These are published on our online magazine, The Hoot.
Looking at the bottom-left part of the poster, we've been passionate this year about bug hotels! We have invited students and staff to learn how to make them for their own gardens, as well as sharing video and online magazine tutorials too. There is also a picture of one of the many large bug hotels we have on campus.
On the bottom right, you can see that we are excited and proud to tell you that our campus has been accredited as hedgehog-friendly! We achieved the silver level this year. Through this we have arranged litter picks on campus with students and staff, as well as asking students to help by litter picking in their own communities. In our Annual Membership Survey, students told us that their first-choice in-person activity to get involved in is litter picking, so we have captalised on that this autumn and arranged a huge coordinated litter pick with our event and meet-up hosts for our Welcome Week.
We also engage students through volunteering opportunities, we have around ten student hedgehog ambassadors who help us to raise awareness of hedgehogs and protecting nature and wildlife. Our students also bring this information to their academic boards of study that they attend.
Ultimately, we're trying different strategies to reach students to see what works and what doesn't. And some things have gone better than others. The Sustainability Representative role is only one-year-old and one of the newest added to the Student Leadership Team, and we are excited to continue trying lots of different ways to reach students in-person and at home.
Open SU are so proud to have won this poster competition at the RAISE conference, and can't wait to continue embedding sustainability into our work wherever we can.