JISC

Overview

The aim of the Principles in Patterns project is to identify the key processes associated with the design, documentation, support and implementation of curricula in higher education and to develop ways of enhancing these processes using digital technologies.

What is curriculum design?

The core activity of curriculum design occurs when disciplinary experts formulate a plan (a learning design pattern) specifying the teaching, learning and assessment activities that will be implemented in classes, modules, courses or programmes of study. The curriculum only becomes a reality, however, when teachers implement this learning design with real students in real classrooms.

A complex mix of institutional processes helps formalise and support curriculum design:

• external drivers, internal objectives and available resources all frame what curricula are provided;
• processes and procedures within institutions determine the sequence of planning, documentation approval and quality assurance of curricula;
• stakeholders from different functional areas (e.g. registry, estates, IT services, academic office, departments, faculties and senate) co-ordinate the activities that support curriculum design and delivery.

The intention of the PiP project is to enhance both the core activity of learning design and the institutional processes associated with the development and implementation of learning designs.

Enhancing learning design: principles in patterns

Members of the PiP team will develop tools and techniques to support academic staff as they engage in learning design and will develop ways of recording, representing, sharing and reusing learning designs within and across disciplines.

The REAP project (www.reap.ac.uk) has already shown that powerful pedagogical ideas underpin effective learning designs. In REAP, it was assumed that the purpose of higher education was that students learn to manage and direct their own learning, to become self-regulated learners.

Based on this premise, a set of learning design principles http://www.reap.ac.uk/resourcesPrinciples.html was devised and implemented in 19 modules across three different higher education institutions. The re-designed modules resulted in improvements in student learning and established the value of translating pedagogy into design principles. However, REAP did not fully explore ways of packaging and sharing the learning designs that were implemented.

The PiP project will develop further the work started in REAP. It will identify ways of harnessing academic staff motivation to engage in design and re-design by developing designs that are not only pedagogically sound but that also address bottlenecks to student learning in disciplines. Examples of bottlenecks include disciplinary concepts that are difficult to understand, skills that are hard to master and limited feedback on assignments because of large numbers of students.

Initially, a limited set of design principles will be utilised to test their robustness within and across disciplines and to test different ways of representing and sharing designs.

Enhancing institutional processes that support curriculum design

The PiP team will also develop new ways of supporting the associated processes that contextualise, guide and support curriculum design. This will involve mapping out the milestone steps from an idea for a new class or module through to its formalisation as part of the curriculum provision. These steps currently include decision-making processes (e.g. departmental, faculty and institutional approval), documentation production, resource allocation, estates consumption and timetabling. The intention is to identify all stakeholders involved in these support, validation and quality enhancement processes in order to determine workflow bottlenecks, gaps in documentation and barriers to communication across stakeholders.

From this map the PiP team will develop a range of enhanced processes, tools and technologies to support decision-making, to streamline procedures, to address workflow bottlenecks and to enable new connections to be made between curriculum design and other organisational processes e.g. the implications of design for estates consumption and technology requirements.

Curriculum design and faculty engagement

In the first two years of the PiP project team will work with departments within the Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Studies. This faculty is currently redesigning the whole of their first year curriculum in relation to some of the REAP principles. It therefore provides a test-bed to develop learning designs and to map out the strengths and weaknesses of current institutional support processes. From year two onwards the team will extend the focus of the project to additional faculties across the institution. The project team is working closely with central and support services within the University of Strathclyde including the Academic Office, IT Services and Registry.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• A set of learning design patterns that address known teaching and learning issues of high relevance to academic staff in the disciplines.
• A set of tools to support the production of learning designs, their representation, storing and reuse by academic staff in the disciplines.
• A map of the sequence of institutional processes and procedures that support decision-making and approval of curricula.
• A set of tools to support the streamlining and enhancement of institutional processes and procedures associated with curriculum design.