CURRICULUM DESIGN FOR TRANSFORMATION for a curriculum which is
Informed Inspired Innovative
Curriculum Design for Transformation
This toolkit has been developed to support Canterbury Christ Church University’s Learning and Teaching Strategy (2015-2020), specifically the principle, Curriculum Design for Transformation, which states: •
Building expertise in curriculum design is essential to deliver the University’s ambitions for a first class higher education experience and excellent outcomes for all students.
•
All new curricula should demonstrate clearly how the learning, teaching and assessment strategy supports the inclusion and success of diverse student groups, accessibility, graduate employability, internationalisation and social and environmental responsibility.
•
Curricula should encourage asking deep questions, accepting uncertainty and challenging accepted thinking through excellent learning, teaching and assessment strategies.
•
Curricula should develop a quest for knowledge and understanding through creating, testing and communication of ideas using inter-relationships within and beyond the programme.
•
Curricula design should take into account the need for increasingly flexible modes of delivery.
•
Curricula should be informed by research and involve the students in the creation of research.
Anyone involved in learning and teaching on CCCU programmes can use this toolkit to write a new programme or review and modify an existing one. The toolkit aims to provide you with guidance on how to ensure your programme meets the requirements of the learning and teaching strategy, which is particularly important if you are seeking programme validation or reapproval. The toolkit brings together learning and teaching initiatives and existing tools into one model. There is a suggested order for going through the toolkit, but it can also be a handy guide if you want to improve a certain aspect of your programme, such as use of blended learning or employability. The toolkit is also available online as a Blackboard site.
2
Graduate Attributes
Graduate attributes are the start and end point of the curriculum. They are not a set of skills but the generic description of a CCCU graduate on which you build your picture of a graduate of your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession.
• • • •
How will you ensure your graduates are adaptable? What does digitally literate look like for your discipline? How should a professional communicate effectively? What skills will they need to be innovative in your subject?
Graduate attributes are also part of our increased relationship with employers. Whatever ones’ philosophy of higher education, the enormous financial and personal investment today’s students are making means that graduate employability is a highly desired outcome for them. In addition, the Teaching Excellence Framework will require us to demonstrate that we are considering our graduate employability outcomes from the outset. Your curriculum will need to embed graduate employability through all levels of your curriculum. Suggested activity • • • •
What are the types of employment your graduates may enter? If your curriculum is professional – how can you give your graduates an edge? Map these against the Graduate Attributes and the opportunities in your curriculum – how could you build on these? What new opportunities could you create?
Make an appointment with your Faculty Career Development advisor to discuss the possibilities.
3
Your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession
The foundation of your curriculum will be your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession. This will inform the knowledge, skills and values which you will be teaching, the way it they are taught, where they are taught and how they are assessed. This is because at the heart of all Higher Education is the scholarship and research base of your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession which you hold both as a guardian and well as generator/evaluator of new knowledge. To do this you will have a particular view of knowledge; what it is and how it is validated and how this helps us to understand ourselves and the world (the epistemology and ontology). In your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession, you are helping to induct your students into that particular perspective – in effect you want them to ‘become’ part of your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession. This is a transformative process. They are not simply learning new or harder facts in HE, but they are transforming their view of the world into a more specialist one – the one agreed by your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession. This is why one of the most useful tools in your curriculum design toolkit is identifying your Threshold Concepts; those parts of your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession which define and give it structure. Of course, you should also consult your Subject Benchmark Statements, hosted by the QAA. There are generic skills and values common to all HE learning such as critical thinking, research, academic integrity and information and digital literacy. These are graduate attributes valued by employers. However, what makes your graduates special is the Subject, Discipline and/or Profession ‘flavour’ given to these as well as specific skills 4
and values. Bringing a historical or sociological perspective is different to a scientific or aesthetics one. So rather than worrying about your content when you begin to design your curriculum, it is more important to think about the journey you are taking your students on to lead them further into the specialised world of your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession, at whatever level they are studying. Then what, how and where they learn and are assessed emerge naturally. Suggested Activity: In your programme team spend some time identifying your Threshold Concepts. Think about how you learned them and how/if they can be broken down at each HE level.
5
CCCU Learning and Teaching Strategy
The Nine Principles of the Learning and Teaching Strategy provide a foundation for designing your curriculum to ensure that you meet the University’s vision for excellent higher education and high quality student outcomes. They do not tell you how to teach, but ask you to reflect more deeply on your curriculum and how you can support the transformative journey of your students as they negotiate through the difficult task of becoming a graduate in the 21st Century. The demand on students has never been higher. They not only have to learn the academic skills and knowledge in your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession, but also are expected to manage their personal development (as global citizens) and employability profile. Successful programmes build opportunities into every aspect of their curriculum for students to develop and succeed. Suggested Activity: Use a pack of Learning and Teaching Strategy cards to inspire conversation about how your programme already provides opportunities for the Nine Principles to benefit your students. Identify small steps you could take to increase these or fuel innovation. 6
Three Key Questions
How does your curriculum help your students • Manage transitions? • Make connections? • Integrate?
These three questions provide an opportunity to slice through your curriculum from different angles and focus on the student journey from different perspectives. They can be interpreted in multiple ways: Your curriculum needs to take place in time and space. Decisions about when and where teaching and learning take place can have a profound effect on student learning and outcomes. Think about the buildings, IT infrastructure, specialist classrooms, timetable, mix of face-to-face, guided or online study, and other environmental factors which you might need to include in your design. These will have an impact on how to manage your students’ transitions, connections and integration.
Transitions • These could be transitions into university, from level to level, from graduate to postgraduate or into employment. • How about transitions between modules? Are these logical? • How do students move through different levels of working with knowledge, build skills and develop values? How does your curriculum support these transitions?
Connections • How do students make connections between different knowledge, theory and practice, ideal and real world? • How do students connect with the programme, with the School, with the wider university? • How does your programme connect with external stakeholders, employers? • How do your academics connect with subject research or industry? • See UCL’s Connected Curriculum model
Integration • How do students integrate their knowledge, skills and values? • How do you integrate employability, sustainability, internationalisation etc ? • How are your students helped to belong to your programme, School and wider university? • How are students enabled to develop an identity as a graduate of your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession?
This list is not exhaustive! Feel free to expand it. 7
Students as Partners in Learning
The CCCU Learning and Teaching Strategy 2015-2020 and Strategic Framework 20152020 puts students at the heart of the university as Partners in Learning. This is expressed throughout the documents with our first university value being: We value the development of the whole person, respecting and nurturing the inherent dignity and potential of each individual. In the Learning and Teaching Strategy, principles, such as Educating the Whole Person, Students as Partners in Learning and Supporting Success for all Students signpost this commitment. The principle Curriculum Design for Transformation clearly states: All new curriculum should demonstrate clearly how the learning, teaching and assessment strategy supports the inclusion and success of diverse student groups, accessibility, graduate employability, internationalisation and social and environmental responsibility. Whether you are undertaking the review and revalidation of an existing programme or designing a brand new one, you should see your students as a resource to help you design your programme. This can be done in many different ways; from analysing learning points in module evaluations to a full co-design process where students are involved at every stage of the curriculum. You are recommended to engage as fully as possible with students; market testing ideas, co-designing modules and assessments, mapping the student journey and building in opportunities for research. There are many services within Learning and Teaching Enhancement which can help you to engage more fully with your students. Student Engagement can suggest ways to build belonging, connection and a strong student voice. The CCCU Partners in Learning team can help you develop partnership working with your students around learning, teaching and assessment.
8
Curriculum Design Tools These Curriculum Design Tools are powerful ways to ensure that your curriculum is efficient, effective, flexible, sustainable and inclusive. See pages 9-14 for further information.
• • • • •
9
Constructive Alignment Threshold Concepts Assessment for Learning Blended/eLearning Inclusive Curriculum
Curriculum Design Tool - Constructive Alignment
A principle used for designing learning in which the components in the teaching (teaching methods, assessment tasks etc) are aligned with the learning activities assumed in the intended outcomes. Key to this is ensuring that the learning outcomes match the HE level expectations as well as the Subject, Discipline and/or Profession. The idea behind this principle is that if you want students to perform well in assessment, the learning outcomes signpost the academic performance expected at assessment (e.g. writing a critically evaluative essay) and the content is taught in such as way that the student is well-prepared for the assessment.
Engaging with this principle should inspire you to develop better teaching methods more suited to your students’ learning needs and more transparency around assessment. It does not mean ‘spoon-feeding’ your students. Quite the opposite, it means making it clear from the outset what the academic demand of the unit of study will be. To help develop really good learning outcomes which describe clearly what you want to see the student doing, use Biggs' SOLO Taxonomy to link clearly to the expectations at different levels of learning.
Read more about Constructive Alignment on John Biggs' website
Watch a video which explains Constructive Alignment and the SOLO taxonomy in an accessible way.
10
Curriculum Design Tool - Threshold Concepts
Threshold concepts were proposed by Jan Meyer and Ray Land as a way to identify those parts of a subject or discipline which act as a portal or essential stepping stone to full integration. At HE level, knowledge is considered for its own sake and a scholar will have integrated it to become a specialist in that subject or discipline; it has become part of your identity. You are not just someone who knows certain facts, you are a sociologist, a historian, a scientist, a nurse or economist. In order to become this, you had to grasp certain key concepts or skills and in doing so you were gradually transformed into who you are today in relation to your specialism. It is akin to passing through into a new realm where everything is transformed; there is no ‘unlearning’ what you have learned, it is not a matter of forgetting a few facts, what you have learned has changed your perspective. When planning your teaching or curriculum, by identifying threshold and key concepts, you begin to focus what is important for you to help the students learn and distinguish that from what the students can learn independently. You can make your teaching much more student-centred, using active learning techniques where the students are doing most of the work based on tasks you have designed for them and you can strip away the content to give time for students to engage with you and each other to promote discussion, experimentation and learning from mistakes. Knowing your threshold concepts also means you can assess a student more effectively as you are able to identify why they are not progressing and give more useful feedback and guidance. It means that when you are teaching you can make learning meaningful as you are able to communicate how what students are learning fit with a wider whole. Meyer J and Land R (2003) Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines Edinburgh; Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses Project, Occasional Paper 4 [on-line, UK] available http://www.tla.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/ETLreport4.pdf (accessed 3 October 2007) Read more about Threshold Concepts on these very comprehensive web resources: Introduction to Threshold Concepts http://www.doceo.co.uk/tools/threshold_3.htm#ixzz4TUToM3ct
11
Curriculum Design Tool - Assessment for Learning Assessment is an important aspect of student learning and should be used to help reinforce the expected standards. Our interactions with students, through assessment and feedback, should help students engage with the assessment criteria. Used well, assessment can have a significant influence on student study behaviours, their approach to learning and improvement in outcomes, both in terms of their subject knowledge as well as future success beyond study. Both formative and summative assessment play an important role in promoting learning; the former through offering ongoing opportunities to consolidate and evaluate learning and assessment performance, and the latter by providing the final expression of the learning outcomes for which the student must prepare.
You can promote assessment for learning by:
•
Engaging your students with the assessment criteria and how they link to the learning outcomes
•
Creating an assessment regime which supports personalised learning through introducing choice and partnership with students
•
Ensuring that feedback leads to improvement by making it timely, detailed and able to be acted upon by your students
•
Focusing on student development by making assessment encourage deep learning, reflection and self-efficacy
•
Using assessment which stimulates dialogue and creates a learning community around assessment literacy
•
Focusing on sustainability, ensuring assessment is manageable for staff and students and provide enough time for study both in and out of class
Visit the Assessment Decisions Framework website for an excellent in depth approach to assessment design in Higher Education.
12
Curriculum Design Tool - Blended Learning CCCU is committed to build our capacity as a digital university to ‘provide flexible and responsive learning environments to enable effective learning to take place in a wide variety of physical and virtual spaces supported by up-to-date learning technologies where appropriate’: CCCU Learning and teaching Strategy 2015 – 2020. Teaching is blended when learning and teaching is be delivered through an optimal blend of online, mobile and face-to-face experiences, including self-directed and peer learning. The exact nature and balance of that blend will depend on the needs of your programme and students. CCCU has a model for Blended Learning
When you design your courses you should think about how blended learning approaches are embedded in overall curriculum design and are logically linked to learning outcomes. You should ensure learning technologies and face-to-face teaching approaches are chosen to best meet the desired course and subject learning outcomes and support student learning and engagement. Therefore, when you blend learning you not only have to make decisions about what you put online, but also how you make use of your face to face (classroom) teaching hours. Common ways to use your classroom contact with students can include: • • • • •
Activities which are focused on deepening learning (active learning) Opportunity for correcting mistakes or misconceptions Revision Helping students make sense of content Embedding/reinforcing threshold concepts 13
• •
Grappling with difficult issues Giving space for debate You are strongly recommended to contact Learning and Teaching Enhancement and your Faculty Learning Technologist early on in the curriculum design process to discuss the potential for blending in your programme. There are many benefits for both staff and students from using alternative forms of learning using technology and new tools and techniques emerging all the time.
Curriculum Design Tool - Inclusive Curriculum
The University has a duty, and teaching staff have a responsibility, to provide an inclusive learning and teaching environment, which meets the needs of all of our students. As an institution which welcomes students with a diverse range of characteristics and with varying levels of preparedness for university study, making the curriculum more inclusive is a powerful way to increase our students outcomes and potential for success. Additionally from 2016 onwards, the funding for specialist support for students with non-medical conditions (e.g. dyslexia, autism spectrum disorder) through the Disabled Students Allowance (DSA) will be discontinued. Initially this may require you to make changes to the design processes influencing learning, teaching and assessment practices to ensure you are not disadvantaging students with specific needs. This is a legal requirement under the Equality Act, but over time, inclusive curriculum design will benefit all your students and will reduce the need to make individual adjustments or changes.
Principles of inclusive curriculum design are that it is: Anticipatory, Flexible, Accountable, Collaborative, Transparent and Equitable. You have access to the Inclusive Learning and Teaching blackboard which has many useful resources to help you increase inclusivity of your curriculum. Learning and Teaching Enhancement staff from Academic Professional Development and Learning Technology can offer support and guidance to help you.
The Higher Education Academy have useful resources at subject level. Plymouth University have produced a handy guide for inclusive assessment.
14
Sustainable Design Digital Literacy Academic Professional Development
Assessment Literacy Sustainable Design with students as partners
Research Informed Teaching
Information Literacy Graduate Employability Initiatives
Once validated, your programme will run for six years. During this time you will have to ensure that your students are equipped to deal with changing demands, internally, externally and beyond graduation. You will have to have a programme which is flexible enough to continue recruiting, support retention, manage transitions and promote progression in the new funding reality for HE in the UK. At CCCU we are committed to working with students as partners in learning and this is at the heart of creating sustainability from pre-arrival to becoming alumni. We aim to build a strong community of learning and increasing digital, assessment and information literacy for both staff and students is one way to open up dialogue and shared understanding. Making connections with employers and equipping our students for the workplace will help those of our students with aspirations to social mobility. Your curriculum will be sustained when research remains at the heart, both to inform it and create new knowledge creators in your Subject, Discipline and/or Profession. Your educators should be up to date with higher education pedagogies, ways to enhance student engagement and engaged in critical reflective practice as part of their continuing professional development. 15
Finally, one of the best ways to develop a shared appreciation of sustainability is to embed it as a thread running through your curriculum.
Every year the institution will provide Annual Programme Monitoring to ensure the continuing quality of the programmes we offer. The way this is being assessed is changing because of the focus on student satisfaction and concern. Surveys such as the National Student Survey and assessment through the Teaching Excellence Framework mean that all programmes will be expected to be undergoing their own critical self-evaluation to identify areas for improvement and taking swift action to implement change.
The good news is that programmes are already doing much of this in collaboration with: • • • • • • • •
Sustainability Learning and Teaching Enhancement Partners in Learning Learning Technology Career Development Library Services Academic Professional Development Student Support, Health and Wellbeing.
Staff from these teams are available to support, offer guidance, propose innovation and help you create bespoke solutions for your curriculum.
16