Wednesday 28 April 2010

Third CAMEL meeting

The third CAMEL meeting for JISC Curriculum Design Cluster C took place over two days, on the 27th and 28th April. This time University of Ulster hosted the meeting, which took place at Belfast Campus. Peter Bullen, the Cluster's critical friend, was the chair for the event.

Day 1 began with a short presentation on Viewpoints tools, followed by an interactive session. All the attendees got a chance to try out a module-level workshop, usingthe Assessment and Feedback and Information Skills best practice cards and large A0 laminate worksheets.

See the Viewpoints presentation here:




The whole cluster group was split into two teams, both considering module design. One team looked at their Assessment and Feedback strategy and one considered their Information Skills strategy for a course module.



Both teams had a number of tasks to complete: they chose their objective for consideration, selected relevant best practice cards, mapped these principles to the timeline, chose implementation ideas from the reverse of the cards, tailored the solution to their own ‘practice’, and came up with action points.



This was a lively and well debated session – the Assessment and Feedback group came up with an interesting ‘cyclical’ approach, using similar cards at different points in the timeline, but emphasizing student progression towards more autonomy – while the Information Skills group went for more of a matrix, and their action points were very specific and practically focused.

From the discussions, it emerged that Rebecca Galley is going to be talking to librarians in the Open University about information literacy, so that may be an interesting link for the Viewpoints team.

Peter Bullen emphasized that this particular CAMEL meeting was focusing on the impact each project could have on their prospective institutions, and subsequent discussions over the next two days revolved around that theme. As part of our first session on ‘impact’, we thought about an impact that, as a project, we could confident we could deliver, and one impact that we aspired to achieve. We then shared these with the rest of the cluster.



On the second day, Rachel Harris from Inspire Research joined us (via Elluminate) to help discuss impact on our respective institutions, based around the HEA’s Evaluation and Impact Assessment Approach.



In our teams, we discussed the first four questions from this document – intended outcomes, main beneficiaries, how to know these outcomes had been achieved, and how teams could discover whether outcomes had been achieved. Rachel (and the cluster) then commented on these initial discussions.

We discussed the difficulties of evaluating impact over the short life cycle of the JISC Design projects, and discussed how staff might use our workshops, and what the desired outcomes might be. We also discussed sharing these outputs with JISC CETIS.

Finally, we were reminded of key dates for the calendar: the upcoming JISC Design Programme meeting on Wednesday 12th May, the LAMS Design Bash on Friday 16th July, and two further CAMEL meetings for our cluster in November 2010 and April 2011.