This reflection arises from our involvement in ‘With Love from a Student: Things that Matter to Me‘ and a shared sense of responsibility for what that work asks of educators. The booklet centres student voice through short, numbered prompts designed to encourage reflection and dialogue in teaching and staff development contexts. Its open licence extends that responsibility beyond a single setting, inviting reuse and adaptation to reflect on how openness, student voice, and everyday teaching practice intersect in our own work.
We both came to the project through the University of Leeds Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) community, which fostered experimentation, reflective practice, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. For us, the booklet became a practical way to connect student voice with real decisions we make about teaching, feedback, assessment, and emerging technologies such as Generative AI.
SHABBAR: For me, “open education” was not part of my everyday academic vocabulary before this project. I teach Computer Science fully online and contribute to online provision linked to the MSc (Artificial Intelligence). I am familiar with conversations about GenAI in education, but I hadn’t previously considered openness as a deliberate design choice: creating teaching resources that others can access at no cost, reuse, adapt to their context, and build on.
Contributing to the booklet changed that. My contribution focused on AI-related student messages that ask educators to pause before judging. One prompt explicitly asks staff not to assume GenAI use equals cheating, but to ask students how they used it. Another frame of GenAI is potentially “new to all” staff and students, and invites us to learn responsible use together. There is also a message that captures a very real anxiety in current practice: worry about false positives from AI detection tools and the need for fair, evidence-based processes. Because my teaching is online, I immediately saw how usable the “flashcard” format is. A single page can serve as a short discussion starter in a live online session or as a reflective activity in an asynchronous forum.
REBECCA: Though I was already aware of the concept of open education, but this was only in the abstract. ‘With Love from a Student’ was the first time I had seen open education in practice and very excited by what I saw.
Sharing educational resources and collaborating on developing tools for learning can only benefit both lecturers and students. In a world in which more and more paywalls are going up for accessing information and knowledge, the need for the creation and sharing of open educational resources is needed more than ever. Another great value that open educational resources have is that they are flexible in nature and are therefore customisable to local needs. The deceptively simple layout of ‘With Love from a Student’ makes this resource more flexible as a tool that can be used in different ways such as flash cards or projected overhead in a classroom.
This book also strips back all the pedagogy and research you may be used to seeing in teaching texts, and instead homes in on one thing: the student’s perspective. This resource provides authenticity and a diversity of perspectives. Near the beginning of the book one message is: “When I say, ‘I don’t understand’, be mindful that it was not easy for me to admit it’.
This book is full of powerful messages such as this, reminding us of what it is like being a student, the questions students may have, their fears, anxieties, as well as their curiosity and excitement about the course they are studying. Messages like “Have you ever struggled to learn something, like I do sometimes?” challenges lecturers to reflect on their own experience with learning, consider the challenges they may have faced in the past, and empathise with what their students may be experiencing now in their own learning.
Shared takeaways
This project showed us that the value of open education lies in what it enables, not in what it accumulates, and we are both motivated to further explore open education to benefit students and make their futures brighter.
Link to the publication:
‘With Love from a Student: Things that Matter to Me‘
Information about the article authors
Dr Shabbar Naqvi, School of Computer Science, University of Leeds, UK
s.naqvi@leeds.ac.uk
Dr Rebecca J. Wray, School of Psychology, University of Leeds, UK
r.j.wray@leeds.ac.uk