The Knowledge Exchange Impact Tool will:
a) Evaluate the impact of student knowledge exchange for four stakeholder groups: students, opportunity providers (such as businesses, charities, social enterprises, and not for profit organisations), higher education institutions, and place, economy, and society.
b) Provide evidence of the ways in which KE activities directly involve and benefit students, and demonstrate approaches that optimise student benefit for a given KE activity.
c) Build and enhance effective KE practice that benefits students and to make frameworks and evaluation methods portable and accessible to the higher education sector.
d) Tackle evidenced challenges of equality of opportunity and diversity and inclusion within existing KE activities reducing barriers to student participation and success in KE.
e) Provide evidence of the ways in which KE activities directly involve, benefit and impact businesses
The wider project includes providing Virtual Knowledge Exchange Internships and Enterprise Activities.
Virtual internships widen accessibility for all students to engage with meaningful work experience, especially students from a widening participation background who might otherwise face barriers to engaging with traditional internship models. Virtual internships offer many benefits including reduced costs for students and employers, increased working flexibility to accommodate students with caring responsibilities or disabilities and to connect employers with students who are uniquely well equipped to embrace digital working practices. Through the Knowledge Exchange Internship scheme, our aim is to provide opportunities for a diverse range of under-represented students and graduates to engage in Knowledge Exchange with local and nationally located SMEs, non-profits, charities, start-ups and social enterprises.
Enterprise activities, bootcamps and future of work workshops co-create experiential and multi-disciplinary challenges or workshops that engage students from different backgrounds. These activities not only up-skill our students and also serve as a fertile soft recruitment tool for organisations and can help crowd-source exceptional minds on business challenges.