Mary Carswell

Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Academic and Employer Engagement

 

Project: Technology-supported processes for agile and responsive curricula (T-SPARC)

Programme: Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design

 

The T-SPARC project sought to change the balance of staff activity in relation to programme design and approval. The baseline review revealed that when programme teams designed (or redesigned) courses they felt they spent a disproportionate amount of time ‘preparing for an approval event’ rather than ‘designing a course’. Furthermore, programme teams worked on module design in a parallel fashion with limited cross-modular oversight, with module design being undertaken with limited significant input from important stakeholders such as students and employers. Important and useful input from external experts at the point of approval (the panel event) was often received too late for the programme team, and thus the course, to fully benefit from ideas and thoughts brought forward. This project sought to use technology to support course design and approval processes to:

• Give better quality information to staff designing courses
• Provide greater opportunities for stakeholder engagement in curriculum design
• To promote course-level design over module-level design
• To deliver more efficient approaches to the construction and storage of definitive documentation
• To offer more opportunities for formative dialogue that could influence course design
• To automate some of the workflows associated with course design and approval

 

Alignment with institutional agendas and strategies

A key aspect of the project was to get people to be more innovative in programme design throughout the design life-cycle (including greater interaction between the programme team and external expertise, such as students, critical friends from other subject areas and learning and teaching experts) and this aligns with key university and corporate objectives e.g. in terms of enhancing learning and teaching (defined in the learning and teaching strategy) and employability (e.g. equipping students with the skills for employment and in being practice-based).

 

“Programme design is crucial to us delivering to our corporate objectives.”

 

Impact on staff culture and capabilities

The pilot programmes teams have spent a very high proportion of their time in design activity as opposed to just preparing for approval (80%-20% has been offered as a provisional figure) and this has led to programmes having been successfully approved using the new processes and systems and where staff have expressed their keenness to continue to use the processes and systems.

 

A key goal has been to encourage greater openness and willingness to listen to other viewpoints e.g. through peer review of teaching, use of students, critical friends and learning and teaching experts in programme design.

Constant change is a feature of university life and a structured approach is needed to support staff in change – lessons have been learnt about managing such change and these can be applied to future innovation and change projects. The project has also highlighted that assumptions cannot be made that all staff know basics such as how to write learning outcomes, therefore guides and resources have been developed to support staff in making decisions e.g. “the rough guide to curriculum design”.

 

“But what we want to do is to try to support programme teams in the change process, and that’s a structured approach that we’re looking at here, hopefully that helps people to cope with the change rather than, you know, a few guidance notes and ‘Go off and do it, guys’.”

 

“Every programme team that is going to start this process off, we will have a development event with that programme team which then goes through the process that really reinforces the principles of why we’re doing it and the pedagogical aspects of that, and it gives a really good opportunity for having more interaction with the programme team at an earlier stage to make sure they’re going in the right direction and then using the system to help them.”

 

Impact on the student journey

Students are a key part of the programme design process, working as student academic partners where they have a direct involvement in learning and teaching projects that then shape the programme. Similarly, every programme must have involvement with employers in the design of the programme. With these types of engagement as part of the processes, there will be better-designed and more innovative programmes which meet the needs of students and help them to be more employable as well as giving them a more enjoyable and successful experience.

 

“Good programmes are the absolute must in order to get the best student experience. So improving one will improve the other, and we do get that sense from involving students more in these sorts of discussions now, working with programme teams which include students, you know that the students benefit from good programme design.”

 

Impact on institutional efficiencies and effectiveness

The project is intended to make the whole programme design process more efficient because the process supports getting the design right first time around i.e. staff do not design something that then needs to be changed later, because they get it right first time. The process encourages staff to give more thought early on in the project to key issues in relation to learning and teaching enhancement e.g. the need for resource materials and allocation of spending on journals and books.

 

Quality Assurance (QA) is embedded into the entire life-cycle of the process. The processes and systems help to overcome problems relating to end-point programme approval panels, where, for instance, it is often too late-on in the process for external examiners to have an effective influence on programme design. If they are able to have an influence earlier on in the process, they may be able to introduce more creative, efficient and effective approaches to programme design and thus the more iterative design process that the project has produced is much more effective from a QA perspective. The project has currently not quantified those efficiencies, however, intends to do so in the near future and it anticipates significant cost savings.

 

The project also provides better quality information to staff designing courses and provides more efficient approaches to the creation, storage and use of programme documentation as well as automating some of the workflows associated with programme design and approval.

 

“We’ve done things in the same way for a long time and I think most institutions have done things in the same way. If I think back to the first ever programme that I was involved in taking for re-approval, my guess is that I could follow the same process today and no one would notice, they’d think it was completely in sync with what we’re doing now; it hasn’t necessarily moved on, not if it was done well in the first place. And so we probably haven’t made as much use of technology to support and prompt the process.”

 

“Locking the process down through the sort of electronic base allows us to have more direction and, well ‘control’ isn’t the right word, but certainly more moderation of what is happening and to be able to see if we’ve got that [student and Critical Friend] input in the way that we feel we really do need to have.”

 

Impact on institutional management and wider engagement

By focusing on the processes and systems, the innovations are automatically embedded and sustained within the institution.

 

The university has already used the project in support of a QAA audit highlighting that the new processes and systems provide an “open book” approach to programme design and validation, though there may be a need for the creation of a “tracking” document for an external audience.

 

“You have to be careful of what the definition of ‘innovation’ is, because innovation should be about innovating so that we are delivering what is needed now, and that is always going to be shifting and changing. A programme that works now isn’t going to work in five, ten years’ time. So it is absolutely crucial to what we’re about here, and I think a University such as ourselves has to invest in constantly pushing the boundaries; we can’t be sitting on our laurels waiting for students to fall through the doors. We have to be shown to be having programmes that are up to date, embedded in industry, have employer links. So innovation is not an option, it’s an absolutely necessity, so any process which can reinforce that is helpful to us.

 

“There are certain things on some programme that may not be seen to be innovative but if they were applied elsewhere are incredibly innovative.”

 

“If we were located in a lower unemployment area then more students would obviously get into jobs. A very high percentage of our students come from the region and don’t want to move.”