Module Worksheet

This is the Module Perspective worksheet that Viewpoints staff use when delivering a face-to-face workshop with Ulster staff.

(You can download a JPEG of the worksheet from our Flickr photostream)

It allows academics to think about their curriculum design at a module level, and plan their curriculum for that particular module.

Staff are encouraged to identify their objective for their group activity, write it on the module worksheet, and then they are shown the relevant cards for their strand (for example, Assessment and Feedback, Creativity in the Curriculum or Information Skills cards).

They then choose the principles that are relevant to their objective, and map their principles to the worksheet by placing them on the timeline.

Next, they turn the chosen cards over and select the relevant implementation ideas or examples. Finally, they can tailor the plan by adding their own notes and action points to the worksheet.

Assessment and Feedback/Creativity session - Economics

Catherine O'Donnell, Roisin Curran, Karen Virapen and Jill Harrison today delivered a workshop session looking at assessment and feedback strategies and creativity in the curriculum. This session was delivered to staff from the School of Economics.

The group wanted to focus around the first year experience, particularly looking at assessment and feedback strategies for this group. They have some retention and student engagement issues with first years, so are keen to revise their curricula. They also need an overall look at their course strategy in preparation for revalidation next year, and so Roisin Curran gave them a talk on how they could bring creativity to their courses.

Some groups were initially unconvinced as to the merits of using the workshop approach in revising their assessment and feedback strategy, but by the end of the process all the groups were able to come up with a suggested plan to move forward and revise their courses for students.

Slides for this session are available here:

Curriculum Design - Economics workshop

View more presentations from Viewpoints, University of Ulster.

Elluminate online seminar

Viewpoints today hosted an online seminar (using Elluminate software). The aim of this session was to tell interested parties more about the work of Viewpoints.

This Elluminate session gave a brief overview of the Viewpoints project, our key objectives, and the tools that we aim to produce. It described our tool framework and planned project outputs and touched on the possible benefits of our approach to curriculum design.

Participants were able to view some sample workshop materials and a walkthrough of our planned online tool functionality.

Two interactive activities during the session allowed participants to try out the workshop approach for themselves.

Viewpoints also shared user experiences to date by demonstrating a range of 'user stories' in video, audio, photo and quote form.

The session covered the work done to embed Viewpoints tools within our institution, and ended with a discussion of future directions and a structured question and answer session.

To watch the recording of the Elluminate session, click on the link below (warning: this will launch a Java-based application for Elluminate)

Viewpoints archived recording, Elluminate online seminar

You can also watch the user videos that were shown as part of this session:

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:

Curriculum Design, Assessment and Feedback: School of Law First Year Review

View more presentations from Viewpoints, University of Ulster.

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.