Viewpoints Learning Design Workshop

This is a brief report on a half day curriculum design workshop hosted here at City University London. The workshop was facilitated by Dr Alan Masson from the University of Ulster and showcased JISC- funded materials and a handbook for promoting curriculum design workshops for academic and other interested staff.
The materials are intended to facilitate staff who want to design or redesign a whole programme, a module, or part of a module. Four themes of curriculum design are emphasised:
Assessment and feedback (Based on the REAP project)
Learner engagement
Information Skills (based on the Sconul model)
Creativity and Innovation.
Teams who elect to attend a workshop can choose to focus on just one, or a combination of any or all of these themes
The essential features of the materials are as follows
1) A Story Board sheet which is basically a timeline for the delivery of a programme or module
2) Four sets of themed cards, related to the themes already indicated, to act as prompts for aspects of design
3) Additional resources which support each of the themes.
Staff (and students, if they are involved) begin the session by identifying the theme or problem they wish to work on and then use the appropriate cards to design activities, engage learners, promote creativity etc…
Workshops are intended to last for 1 1/2 hours and by the end there should be a sufficient number of outputs to provide a basis for module or course design/redesign, to identify gaps or needs, to provide evidence for validation committees and to provide a foundation for writing course support documents.
Seb Hunt (ADE for SOI) attended this workshop and believed that Viewpoints workshops would be a useful way of facilitating curriculum design in his School.
Neal and Rae attended from the LDC and we will be happy to cascade the training we had to others in the LDC team, to run workshops ourselves or to answer any questions you may have. We also have some of the handbooks produced by the Ulster team to support the process.

Neal
07.06.2011