Revalidation event, Belfast Campus

Catherine O'Donnell, Jill Harrison and Karen Virapen today delivered a Viewpoints workshop session as part of a Revalidation event at Belfast Campus, arranged by Roisin Curran in Staff Development.

Staff from different Art and Design courses who are preparing for revalidation next year attended this workshop. There were about 50 staff attending, in ten groups arranged around the different courses.

Staff were encouraged to consider their courses with the help of Viewpoints prompts - using Assessment and Feedback, Information Skills, and Creativity and Innovation course level cards, and working around course-level laminates. (The Learner Engagement strand was also presented to staff as an option - Learner Engagement cards are currently under development.)

Staff discussed their courses in their teams, noted ideas and action points on the course laminates, and presented their ideas to the group at the end of the session.

Slides from the Viewpoints session are available online:

Viewpoints: School of Art & Design Revalidation Workshop

View more presentations from Viewpoints, University of Ulster.

A Viewpoints revalidation diagram explains the process in more detail and has some useful embedded links for staff. It can be downloaded from Slideshare.

Course revalidation

View more documents from Viewpoints, University of Ulster.

All the resources used in the workshop (worksheets, course level cards, Assessment and Feedback, Creativity and Information Skills module level cards) are available for view or download from the Viewpoints Flickr photostream.

Photos from the day are also available on Flickr.

CAMEL meeting, Open University

The fourth CAMEL meeting for JISC Curriculum Design Cluster C took place over two days, on the 2nd and 3rd December at the Open University, Milton Keynes.

Peter Bullen, our Critical Friend, chaired the sessions, attended by project representatives from the University of Ulster, the Open University, and University of Strathclyde (virtually via FlashMeeting). The theme of the meeting was 'cluster output'.

Day 1 began by talking about project overlaps and it was agreed that what we are all doing could be described as:

Changing culture - individual, team, and institutional processes to improve learning design and therefore the experiences of students.

The project teams are changing culture by the following means:

• Promoting a Curriculum Design language


• Providing frameworks for Curriculum Design (i.e. decision-making frameworks)


• Encouraging and supporting collaboration, reflection and dialogue


• Prompting ideas for Curriculum Design


• Identifying, developing and using catalysts for change (i.e. approval processes)

We then had a brainstorming activity to come up with ideas of possible outputs/artefacts.
We agreed that the cluster should explore the idea of running/leading an online conference based around a theme, which asks the question: 'What needs to change in curriculum design?'

Day 2 began by recapping on ideas discussed from day 1 and then the teams explored a second possible cluster output – podcasts, which could also be used for the online conference.
We finished the day by planning our next steps.