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:

Curriculum Design, Assessment and Feedback

View more presentations from Viewpoints, University of Ulster.

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:

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.

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:

Viewpoints CAMEL meeting - workshop presentationView more

presentations from Viewpoints, University of Ulster.

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.

Assessment and feedback session with PhD students

Fiona Doherty and Catherine O’Donnell delivered a Viewpoints assessment and feedback workshop with PhD students today, as part of their ‘Assessment for Learning’ session with lecturer Dr Patricia Kearney.

The students used the assessment and feedback cards and the module worksheets during the 45 minutes group work activity-based session.

They planned an assessment and feedback strategy for teaching a Masters dissertation module focusing on chosen theme(s). One student from each group presented their final output to the rest of the group at the end of the session.

Photos of the group outputs are available here:



Slides from this session are available here:

Librarian Subject Meeting - Information Skills Presentation

The Viewpoints team gave a presentation today in Jordanstown to all the University of Ulster Subject Librarians.

Librarian Subject Meeting

View more presentations from Viewpoints, University of Ulster.

The purpose of this meeting was to update librarians on the development of the Information Skills strand of the toolset, and to get feedback on the workshop tools developed so far.



We showed librarians the information skills prompt cards we have developed (based on SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy) and the worksheet laminates which we plan to use in Information Skills workshops with course teams.

Catherine O’Donnell led an interactive group activity, where groups were each given one of the cards, asked to critically consider the content and ideas on them, and then think about using the cards for each part of the student timeline.



Each small group then fed back their ideas to the meeting.



The subject librarians were a great audience for testing Information Skills development, as they have such an expert knowledge about the subject and good connections with module co-ordinators and course teams.

There was a lot of lively feedback about the cards and their content on the day and we hope to continue piloting Information Skills content with Ulster librarians in future as it develops.

Viewpoints project diagram

The diagram below shows an overview of the Viewpoints project.



This illustration shows how the Viewpoints reflective tools attempt to bring best practice research into curriculum processes at Ulster.

The tools provide the structure for users to engage with best practice research (via the cards) and a learner timeline and relate this to their teaching practice.

Revalidation workshop

Viewpoints resources were available for use at a revalidation workshop today. Roisin Curran, from Staff Development, delivered the workshop to course teams from the School of the Built Environment.

The resources were available during the course team discussion activity, were each team were asked to consider the ethos of their programme and to consider key topics, such as assessment and feedback, curriculum planning and creativity and innovation.

The Viewpoints resources available included course-level timeline worksheets, course-level best practice cards (assessment and feedback, information skills and creativity in teaching and learning), post-its and markers. Each group were shown the resources and given suggestions of how they could be used - then given the option to use them if they wanted.

Two of the three teams made use of the resources in different ways to aid their programme-planning requirement, as shown in the photos below.



This initial introductory use of the course-level resources showed the value of them to help with curriculum planning activities, such as the Ulster programme revalidation process. Further consideration needs to be given to the timing of the use of the resources in the revalidation process.

The session showed the demand for more scalable resources that practitioners can take away and use - such as a paper-based version of the worksheet timeline (in a flipchart paper format) and printable versions of the best practice cards (perhaps also available on post-its).