JISC

Curriculum design and effective use of learning resources

The range of technologies, tools and digital content available to practitioners offer significant potential to transform their approaches to learning and teaching. Re-design of the curriculum is one of the key opportunities for considering, at an institutional wide level, how technologies and resources can be best used in relation to pedagogic need. So many factors affect these decisions, including the potentials offered by Web 2.0 technologies and social software, ownership of learner content created during the learning process, developing pedagogies, self directed learning and user owned technologies.

Experience to date has shown that taking an institutional-wide approach involving those at policy and strategic level as well as teaching technologists, educational developers and library staff, whilst challenging, can enhance the learner experience.

An important area of work is that of the Design for Learning Programme (D4L) which highlights a range of issues related to designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme. There are significant challenges to representing learning designs in a form that others can read and make sense of. Another issue is the need to ensure that sufficient information is available to enable other teachers to decide on the suitability of a particular learning design for their own circumstances. Many excellent learning designs have been represented and developed through the work of the D4L programme, but many of these in their current form, for a range of reasons, are inaccessible to practitioners.

Session Facilitator: Helen Beetham (consultant to JISC LRA strand)

• What institution wide processes need to be addressed for effective curriculum redesign? Greg Benfield (LEX Learner Experiences of e-Learning project)
• What challenges and solutions exist around student created content and student owned technologies to support self directed learner use of learning resources? Fred Garnet (Becta)
• How do we develop these skills and support for staff to engage with design for learning? Steve Draper (REAP project, SFC transformation programme)