Co-creation experience of a postgraduate programme: case of masters programme on building resilience in tropical agroecosystems

The co-creation approach increasingly becomes the preferred model for designing and delivering solutions with the participation of a knowledgeable community. This study describes a co-creation experience with academia, industry stakeholders and policymakers from agroecosystem setting in designing a Master programme on tropical agroecosystems with the objectives of identifying stakeholder landscape, a co-design a platform and co-create the framework for the planned Master degree programme in tropical agroecosystems. The co-creation process was initiated with a comprehensive literature review followed by several consultations with both European and Sri Lankan partners to develop the framework. Subsequently, an online co-design workshop with the participation of 38 key industry-academia stakeholders was held. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to ensure the inclusion of key participants in the co-creation platform. Co-creation of the Master programme began with the comprehensive literature review of the consortium's academic experts, which facilitated recognising the key thematic areas directly and indirectly in line with tropical agroecosystems. Secondly, two focus group discussions among the consortium members facilitated the laying of the programme structure and identifying program objectives (POs), intended learning outcomes (ILO) and modules, both compulsory and optional. A concept note on programme framework including objectives, intended learning outcomes and modules were developed and shared among the identified stakeholders and was allocated two weeks for review before the co-creation online workshop. Thirdly, an online co-creation workshop on curriculum design was implemented through the Zoom online platform. The stakeholder landscape of the co-creation of the Master programme was developed based on the information derived from the participants. The co-design workshop formed the basis for refining the framework of the Master programme, which comprised objectives, PLOs, ILOs and course modules.