Friday 28 May 2010

Assessment and Feedback workshop - School of Law

Catherine O'Donnell and Karen Virapen today delivered an Assessment and Feedback workshop for a group of academics from the School of Law.

The School of Law are currently undergoing a First Year Review, and in relation to this, the group wanted to look at realigning the first year curricula to give students a more relevant challenge, and help teach students how to develop independent study skills. It seems that first year Law students sometimes struggle with transition, some core law modules, and with the assessment workload.

With this in mind, three teams from the School looked at three different modules with a view to revising them. They looked at redesigning their assessment and feedback strategy at module level. The workshop generated a lot of lively debate, and hopefully this will help kick-start the process of redesigning assessment and feedback strategies for first year students.

Photos of the group outputs and progress are available here:



Slides for this session are also available online through SlideShare:

Thursday 13 May 2010

Business Subject Planning Away Day - Assessment and Feedback/Creativity sessions

Today Dr Alan Masson and Catherine O'Donnell delivered two one hour workshops, one on Assessment and Feedback and another on Creativity in the Curriculum. These workshops were for academics from the Ulster Business School, who were taking part in a (Revalidation) Business Subject Planning Away event.

Slides from the workshops are available here:
The workshops provided some focus, assisted group discussion, helped staff consider challenges and helped them plan what they need to do while preparing for revalidation.

Photos of the group outputs and progress are available here:

Wednesday 12 May 2010

JISC Curriculum Design Programme Meeting

Brass Tacks: Key Challenges in Delivering a Flexible Curriculum, Maple House, Birmingham


Sharon Copeland (Project Manager) gave an update on Viewpoints at the Programme Meeting, bringing everyone up-to-date with the advances the team have achieved.


She told the group about how the team were embedding the tools into the validation process and the work done with the Centre for Higher Educational Practice for the Creativity and Innovation strand of the project.


Sarah Knight (JISC Programme Manager) praised the team for their work to date. Some of the participating projects (such as the University of Bolton) expressed their interest in seeing the digital tools when they are ready for release, as they see a close link with their own curriculum developments.

The meeting was a good opportunity to catch up with the work of the other groups in the Curriculum Design programme and recognise the links across different groups.