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!

Visit from our Critical Friend, Peter Bullen

Today, all the Viewpoints staff met our 'Critical Friend' for our JISC Curriculum Design cluster, Professor Peter Bullen.

Peter currently works as director of the Blended Learning Unit (BLU) at Hertfordshire University, as well as advising the three projects in Curriculum Design Cluster C (University of Strathclyde, the Open University and ourselves).

His role is to give us advice and guidance of what's going on in the sector, encourage us to review our progress, act as an ambassador for the project and to foster links between different projects, where possible.

Our all-day meeting covered a lot of ground. After introductions, Project Director Alan Masson gave a condensed account of the project's aims and direction.

This was followed by a brief presentation of Version 1 of the 'Student Profiler' - an interactive tool to allow staff to think about their student cohort, and the opportunities and risks that might involve. This tool takes the form of a wheel that staff can manipulate to give them an insight into the student group. The simple, yet effective, visual representation lets them think about the course from the student perspective.

Fiona Doherty then presented the second item in development - an interactive tool to help staff with assessment and feedback in their courses. This tool is based around the University of Strathclyde's REAP principles of good assessment, and works by letting staff apply these ideas to a typical student timeline.

Peter was encouraging about the work done so far, and suggested that we be more open about our ideas, showing people outputs as early as possible, in order to get informed feedback early on. To do this, we are creating an invitation-only Ning network online, where we can demo work in beta and get feedback.

Catherine O'Donnell, our Academic E-Learning Consultant and adviser, is involved in mapping all the current curriculum processes in the University - a huge task, but a vital one, as it tells us where Viewpoints work can fit in with current University of Ulster practices.

Peter flagged up our upcoming JISC CAMEL meeting, where our cluster will discuss links, ideas and areas for collaboration. The next CAMEL meeting will take place in Strathclyde in April.

Finally, we talked about stakeholder involvement, thinking about ideas like 'train the trainers' workshops and targeting key figures in each of the academic schools.

It was good for everyone to finally meet Peter and get his perspective on our work - and we look forward to working with him more.

Assessment and Feedback Workshop, Higher Education Academy

Instructional Techologists Fiona Doherty and Karen Virapen attended the HEA Assessment & Feedback Workshop in York, designed to support the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes. This one-day event looked at general overarching issues in assessment.

During the day we were presented with examples of how change in assessment has become embedded in the curriculum in institutional practice. Presentations were delivered from the HEA and several universities, all of which are available on the HEA website.

JISC Curriculum Programmes – Case Studies

This event gave us the opportunity to find out more about two other JISC Curriculum programmes, the University of Hertfordshire ESCAPE Project and the University of Westminster eReflect Project.

Mark Russell from ESCAPE talked about how they are mapping technology to learning using Chickering & Gamson’s Principles and mapping technology to assessment using the REAP Principles. This has similarities with current Viewpoints work mapping C&G and REAP to a student timeline. Further information on the ESCAPE project is available at: http://escape-uh-jisc.blogspot.com/

Gunter Saunders, eReflect, University of Westminster explained how the eReflect project is developing a student centred process for reflection on feedback.

REAP Project - embedding good practice principles

Catherine Owens from the University of Strathclyde and Steve Draper from the University of Glasgow talked about the success of the REAP Project. In a case study of 1st year Psychology students, student performance improved considerably after the REAP Project redesigned their assessment and feedback practice based on REAP Principles.

This was a very useful and informative day for our project, as we are currently developing the Assessment and Feedback tool for Viewpoints, and a lot of the information has synergies with the work that we will be doing.

About Viewpoints

ABOUT VIEWPOINTS

At Viewpoints, we believe that learners should be at the heart of teaching and learning. But how does this apply when designing a course?

Viewpoints, a JISC-funded project in the University of Ulster, are creating a series of simple, user-friendly reflective tools (both online and workshop versions) for staff to use, promoting and enhancing good curriculum design.

All our services aim to simplify the course design process, bringing key curriculum information and prompts together in a simple, succinct way. Our tools and workshops will help staff think about course development from a fresh new perspective - putting the learner at the centre of any course.

WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU

Viewpoints can help staff develop any part of a course - from re-working a module, right up to new course design or course revalidation level.

We focus on four different aspects of course design – assessment and feedback, information skills, student interactions and creativity and innovation. We also help you focus on different key points in the student life cycle - from induction to course completion - and consider how these might affect students' learning experiences. Above all, we help to focus attention on a course from the student perspective.

HOW IT WILL WORK

We will ask staff some simple questions about learners or learning perspectives. Based on these responses, they will be given some prompts and feedback that will help them plan and create better course documents.

Tools like the Student Profiler will focus on key issues, such as: who exactly are your students? What cohort issues (such as size of group, academic issues, etc.) might affect the course and how it is designed or delivered?

The output documents from Viewpoints sessions will let staff reflect on and plan their curricula from a new perspective, helping them to tailor courses to the needs of today's learners. These outputs can also be used to inform students about their particular course.

View/Download PDF - About Viewpoints

Project Team

Alan Masson, Director, aj.masson@ulster.ac.uk

Sharon Hayes, Project Administrator, saj.hayes@ulster.ac.uk

Fiona Doherty, Instructional Technologist, fp.doherty@ulster.ac.uk

Karen Virapen, Instructional Technologist, k.virapen@ulster.ac.uk

James Gheel, Senior Systems Developer, j.gheel@ulster.ac.uk

Damien McConville, Academic E-Learning Consultant, d.mcconville@ulster.ac.uk

Catherine O’Donnell, Academic E-Learning Consultant, c.odonnell@ulster.ac.uk

Project Memory

As the project progresses, it's become more important to manage the flow of information - and keep a record of what has happened during the project, both for ourselves and for people interested in Viewpoints.

There is a huge variety of online multimedia tools available that promise to simplify information handling - but we've decided to stick with a few well tried-and-tested editing tools.

This blog will be the main public information site - for people both inside and outside the university. It'll be updated regularly by team members, so anyone reading can quickly log on and find out what's happening, or comment online if they want to discuss any issues. Blogging is a great way to track ideas and progress over time, so hopefully readers will get a sense of how Viewpoints is developing.

For internal communication within the project team, we'll be sharing ideas via our Viewpoints wiki - it's a great way to collaborate on group documents and plans, especially if some team members are off-site. It also eliminates the need for multiple emails pinging round - a huge benefit in this age of overstuffed inboxes!

Some of our work in development will be shared via a closed Ning site. (Ning is a platform for creating your own secure social network). Here, stakeholders and key supporters can comment on work in beta.

To share links, useful articles and research we've found that support what we're doing, delicious is a great resource. Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. You can see Viewpoints bookmarks all in one place here.

All our photos are held online - Viewpoints photos can be seen via the photo sharing site Flickr, and in time we hope to add videos on Youtube, to share case studies and digital stories from users.

From time to time we will also share presentations about the project, and these can now be viewed online via Slideshare, an online slide presentation tool. Keep checking back to see if new presentations have been added.

Finally, you can see our sample student timeline by visiting Dipity and scrolling to view the student life cycle at university.

All these tools will help us maintain a project memory and show how work is progressing from week to week.

Understanding our audience: Stakeholder analysis

This was another crucial planning day for Viewpoints. This time, our goal was to work out who the important stakeholders are for the project, and how exactly they might inform our work, or spread the word about us.

We started by identifying a list of potential internal (i.e. within the University) and external stakeholders, and then mapped them to a list of categories from the JISC Infonet process review document - Strategic, Managerial, Operational, Direct Influence and Indirect Influence. We added two additional categories - Champion (for people who can promote the project on a wider basis) and Support (for those involved in development with us, who might not necessarily use the tools themselves.)

After today, we have a much clearer picture of the people who can influence the direction of the project and its outputs. We hope to begin meetings with internal stakeholders in the next few weeks.