Practical project work fosters transferable 21^st century skills such as teamwork, critical thinking, and problem solving, helping students tackle real-world problems they might encounter in industry. The challenges associated with student engagement are widely acknowledged, and in practical subjects like Computing, the advent of GenAI has compounded these issues. Redesigning assessment is one way to tackle this.

This practitioner paper presents the transition to an agile framework within a Team Project module for second-year undergraduate Computing students. The redesign aimed to boost engagement, enhance collaboration, and align with industry practices. Students completed five two-week sprints, engaging with agile concepts such as product backlogs, sprint planning, scrum meetings, retrospectives and showcases.

The new approach led to noticeably higher engagement, with students responding well to the iterative structure and frequent opportunities for feedback and reflection. Faculty observed improved team dynamics, greater accountability, and more consistent project delivery. This paper outlines the practical aspects of implementation including module structure, staff and student support, technologies used, common challenges, and lessons learned.

Most Level 8’s include a capstone module on independent undergraduate research (UR), whereby students are facilitated through one-on-one academic supervision to solve a problem. Whilst the format can vary across disciplines, the advantages of the final year project (FYP) remain the same, fostering key graduate attributes in critical thinking, problem solving and research dissemination. The FYP is a core assessment tool, providing demonstratable proof of programme learning outcomes. The Science Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Network (est. 2016) strives to highlight the value of UR through our annual student SURE Conference and journal (SURE-J). We have recently expanded into Europe through the Erasmus+ project Posters in Brussels, highlighting the utility of UR to also promote student advocacy. The use of generative AI is now widespread amongst students, leading to concern regarding their capacity to independently synthesize information or think critically. UR provides an opportunity, now more important than ever in this age of misinformation, to teach students fact checking skills. Moreover, it can be used to force students to produce and report upon genuinely authentic and bespoke work independently. Despite frequently stated research ambitions, the resourcing of UR remains insufficient across the TU/IoT Sector. The time is now to change this.

In recent years, a growing number of students are entering Higher Education in Ireland through alternative entry pathways (Keane, 2013). Consequently, institutions must now meet the educational and holistic needs of an increasingly diverse student population.

It is the responsibility of higher education institutions to support students in developing the required study skills required to succeed at this level. The most effective way to enhance study skills is to embed them within the curriculum (Gibbs, 1994; Cottrell, 2001). However, if this is not a feasible option, an alternative delivery method must be developed, one which will engage students even if participation is voluntary.

In response to this need, the Centre for Academic Practice in SETU developed the Higher Education Learner Programme (HELP). This is an online Study Skills programme that was delivered through multiple platforms. Student input was acquired throughout, and elements of content were co-created with students. In this way, we built a programme that could be adapted based on student feedback and whereby students could see that they were part of a larger community with others who had tread the same path before them.

In this presentation, we will present our findings on the effectiveness of this approach.