In this post, Dr Ellie Devenish-Nelson and James Sinclair describe a project that investigated the benefits of inviting alumni to tutor on a MSc course. Ellie is a Lecturer and Deputy Director of the MSc in Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health, and James is a recent alumnus of the MSc, and a Senior Advisory Lawyer at an international investment bank. This post is part of the Student Partnership Agreement 2025 series.
Alumni have been involved in teaching on the MSc Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health since the first graduating cohort, contributing expert knowledge, increasing representation and building student-alumni community. Although informal feedback indicates that students are extremely receptive to their inclusion, we have limited systematic feedback specifically for alumni tutors. This Student Partnership Project was motivated by Ellie’s experience as a Course Organiser, who has seen the benefits students and staff get from interacting with alumni tutors, and James’s experience as a student on the programme, as well as being invited to co-create and tutor on a new elective course.
Although our initial plans to hold focus groups on alumni tutor co-creation fell through, we collected valuable data through a survey on the experience of students of engaging with tutors and of current and former BWEH alumni tutors contributing to the programme.
What do students value about the experience?
There was overwhelmingly strong agreement from students that alumni tutors add value to their courses and improved their overall learning experience. This added value stemmed from tutors contributing perspectives and expertise beyond that of the core programme teaching team, augmenting course content. One of the challenges with online learning is imparting practical and applied skills and while our tutors are still limited by the online environment, their experience as practitioners brings additional real-world elements to our teaching:
“The on-ground lessons that made course materials more practical and relatable.”
Our programme ethos is to equip students with the skills and knowledge to effect global change, which requires an interdisciplinary, inclusive and decolonised curriculum. Our teaching team is simply not sufficiently representative to provide this to our global student body. Therefore, our alumni provide the diversity of voices that is essential for delivering this enabling curriculum.
“They bring a different and fresh perspective to the course.”
Equally important is the inspiration that tutors provide, as students noted that engaging with alumni provided motivation and advice about potential career trajectories, as well as the incentive of contributing to the programme in the future.
“..a unique and valuable insight into the programme as they had participated themselves – it also demonstrated the possibilities for future work or study.”
What do alumni value about the experience?
The alumni were strongly driven to tutor on the programme by wanting to give back to our MSc and be part of our wider programme community, as well as maintain links with the University.
The way in which tutors have contributed has evolved over the years, with the more recent introduction of live drop-in sessions being added to complement the creation of course content and engagement in online discussions. Tutors truly valued these interactions, understanding the need to increase representation as well as contribute to the student’s learning journey with practical examples. These interactions extended the constructivist peer-based learning approach that is central to our programme, by including alumni in this collaborative process to co-create knowledge:
“Learning about other student’s questions and perspectives and seeing how my experiences could help them in their learning process.”
“…able to provide more clarity to students and reconcile course materials with actual subjective experiences.”
Another important element that tutors valued was the opportunity to develop their pedagogical skills, which speaks to the commitment of the university to support continued development and lifelong learning for alumni.
Individually valuable, mutually beneficial
A critical co-benefit emerging from the survey findings is the connection between the student and tutor, with both recognising the importance of having had firsthand experience as a student. Reflections from both students and alumni highlight the lifelong impact of these interactions:
“I still remember some of inputs we had from alumni guest tutor so I definitely would say they have quite an impact! The sharing of their experience was always appreciated as well as the usually good advice they had regarding getting in the conservation field after graduation.”
“Opportunity to re-engage with a subject I’m deeply passionate about, while contributing to the learning journey of current students. To reflect on how my academic foundation has shaped my professional path, and to share real-world insights that helped bridge theory and practice.”
Final thoughts
What do we recommend for other programmes wanting to engage their alumni in their teaching?
- Provide guidance to tutors for developing content. Our tutors work closely with course organisers, but comments from alumni suggest some would appreciate more help.
- Be clear with students what tutors do and don’t do. For example, our tutors don’t mark assignments, but this wasn’t always clear to students.
- Allow space for students and alumni to co-create, including opportunities for live interactions. We introduced live sessions based on student and tutor feedback, which have hugely improved the online learning experience.
- Have a system in place for obtaining feedback about your tutors, for everyone to understand if their contributions are effective. Our tutors often ask for feedback, but we have only recently added this to our end of course questionnaires.
- Ensure your tutors understand your programme’s ethos. As one student pointed out, too many external contributors could risk the programme losing its coherence and identity. We think the benefit of alumni is their understanding of the programme’s ethos and the strong preference for students choosing future courses with a guest tutor suggests the benefits currently outweighs this risk.
- Compensate your tutors appropriately. We pay our tutors, but it is increasingly challenging to navigate the University’s hiring restrictions. Many of our tutors indicated they would accept different forms of compensation (e.g. donating time or to charity, invitation to summer school or University of Edinburgh affiliation), but, to be acceptable, this would need to be commensurate.
- Develop more opportunities for student-alumni networking. As one student said:
“I would love to have more and more formal involvement from alumni tutors during but also after the programme.”
Ellie Devenish-Nelson
Dr Ellie Devenish-Nelson is a Lecturer and Deputy Director of the MSc in Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health, in CMVM. She is interested in developing student-alumni relationships and is the Principal Investigator of a PTAS project to assess the long-term impact of postgraduate online learning for alumni careers and capacity development across three programmes in CMVM.
James Sinclair
James Sinclair is a recent alumnus of the MSc in Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health and a guest tutor on the new nature finance elective for that MSc. He is a Senior Advisory Lawyer at an international investment bank, with a focus on ESG and sustainable finance, as well as being a Trustee for Surrey Wildlife Trust.
