CAMEL meeting, Open University

The second CAMEL meeting for JISC Curriculum Design Cluster C took place over two days, on the 11th and the 12th November at the Open University, Milton Keynes. Peter Bullen, our Critical Friend, chaired the sessions, attended by project representatives from the University of Ulster, University of Strathclyde and the Open University. Helen Beetham and Alison Muirhead also attended.

On the first day, Helen Beetham introduced a session on the cluster's recently completed project baseline reports, talking about issues arising from the three reports and highlighting similarities and differences. Afterwards, Alison Muirhead led a discussion about evaluation challenges and solutions, getting small groups to talk about potential ways of approaching evaluation.

Day 2 of the CAMEL meeting was centred around the Open University's recent work on curriculum design and curriculum representation. It kicked off with a short activity to get academics familiar with using Cloudworks, the Open University's social bookmarking system.

Simon Cross then talked to us about the recent survey looking at staff perceptions around learning design in the OU, and talked about Open University design solutions.

Gráinne Conole's session on course representations introduced a number of different course views being worked on at the Open University. You can view her presentation here:

Curriculum Representations

View more presentations from grainne.

Finally, Paul Mundin introduced a short session on curriculum mapping in the Open University.

CAMEL Meeting, University of Strathclyde

This two-day event was a chance to re-connect with the other projects in our cluster, for the first time since the programme start-up meeting in October. It was a good opportunity to find out what work was going on in both the PiP project (University of Strathclyde) and the Open University's curriculum design initiative.

On the first day, all three projects introduced the work done so far. PiP are building on the work already done as part of their University's REAP project, and are now busy trying embed the principles within University practice. They aim to do the following:

• take a new approach to curriculum design
• articulate what is happening now in curriculum design, including the gaps/blocks
• streamline institutional processes
• discover what materials would be useful for staff.

The Open University are reflecting on what constitutes 'good practice' - good pedagogy, cost-effectiveness and innovation - and they shared information on some of their initiatives to date, including Compendium, a tool for visualising learning designs, and Cloudworks, a social bookmarking tool for academics to share designs.

Feedback on our own presentation was useful and thought-provoking - and highlighted various challenges to our own project, which will inform further work.

The second day's work focused on ways to represent curriculum design and map it at curriculum level - and for a detailed discussion on this, see Gráinne Conole's e4innovation blog.

The CAMEL meeting seems to have created more questions than answers, but it stimulated a lot of lively and often thought-provoking debate!