Stephen Denyer

Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education & Students

 

Project: PALET Programme Approval Lean Electronic Toolkit

Programme: Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design

 

Utilising the Lean Thinking methodology for process improvements, the PALET project has developed revised procedures for the approval of new programmes to create a more agile, efficient and flexible approach to the design of curricula and the subsequent approval process. In the context of the university’s Modern IT Working Environment (MWE) project, a service-oriented approach was used to develop a toolset to support academic and support staff through each stage of the new programme approval process so that the resulting programme and module information is clearly defined and can be seamlessly utilised by other business applications.

 

Alignment with institutional agendas and strategies

There are three key relevant strategies that relate to the PALET project:

• the education strategy (which works from recruitment through to employability)
• “Assessment Matters” which aims to bring uniformity to awarding degrees and enhance academic feedback
• quality assurance, which has in the past been very process-driven rather than focusing on enhancement and risk management.

 

All three of these come together in the university’s aim to create more consistency in curriculum design and engender a more holistic view of a programme, rather than a narrow module-centred view and PALET has been aligned closely with these strategies.

 

On reflection, the timing of the start of the project was a little early as decisions had not been made about key computer systems to underpin the Student Information Management (SIM) system. Once these decisions were made, the project was re-aligned to use the SIM system to underpin processes and this coincided with initiatives such as “Assessment Matters” and “Proving Excellence” (a new form of QA process).

 

Another change also resulted in re-alignment – the cessation of the Learning and Teaching committee in favour of a network of Directors of Learning and Teaching, removing the layer of learning and teaching scrutiny for course development, information and new programme development. This resulted in PALET being much more at the core of a school-based iterative process for course enhancement e.g. with the Head of School affirming strategic alignment at various stages, development of business cases and much greater emphasis on “local” responsibility.

 

Impact on staff culture and capabilities

The PALET resources offer guidance to staff in schools in respect of e.g. more holistic programme-wide approaches to learning design, ensuring that learning outcomes are relevant throughout a programme, that assessments are aligned with learning outcomes and the need to avoid over-assessment. All this is to support a change in culture where there is a stronger emphasis on the student experience and that learning and teaching is a fundamental part alongside research, innovation and engagement.

 

Such holistic approaches to curriculum design will make it easier to respond and align to external change in respect of student employability.

 

“And I think the biggest relationship gulf that has to be crossed, is between the academic schools and the central departments. To a greater or lesser extent, I’ve found that in every institution I’ve been in. But I think because PALET has shown some easing of processes and procedures, it’s been much easier for Heads of Schools to say, ‘Look, don’t complain, just get on with it because this is going to be rather easier to do in the longer run.’ So my sense is that as the benefits become proven, the barriers have become irrelevant.”

 

Impact on the student journey

The university has developed a student charter, a key element of which has been about giving students a very clear understanding, before they arrive, of what they might anticipate and PALET helps to underpin this, through consolidation and consistency of information. The project will also help to improve student recruitment, not just in numbers, but by helping students make fully informed choices, brought about by consolidating information about courses and programmes, which can readily be transferable into web information. This all brings a level of consistency in institutional information that makes comparisons much easier to make and aligns with Key Information Set (KIS) data and other benchmarked information.

 

“And for us to be able to design our curricula to not just be about content but also to be about the spiral character of learning, the ability to take content and translate it from the ‘knows’ to the ‘knows how’ and onto the ‘show how’; so that sense of progressive learning is very important. I think that’ll aid the student experience.”

 

“The way in which a School engages with the information it provides to the students and the way it engages with the design of its provision, fundamentally affects the student experience.”

 

Impact on institutional efficiencies and effectiveness

A LEAN approach is a core element of PALET and the institution already had experience of implementing such LEAN techniques, particularly in relation to processes that appeared overly complex (e.g. School of Nursing admissions processes). LEAN is also about a change of culture and fundamentally reviewing ways of doing things.

 

A core element of the new processes is “local” responsibility which is a cultural issue and has resulted in faster processes and simplified institutional decisions. Those schools that have used the PALET processes to implement single source of module information, and are using the PALET web services to publish the information to students, only need enter and manage the information in the system. Based on data provided by some schools, it takes on average 7 minutes to enter one module description into the system (a time saving of over 85% compared to method used in 2009) at the approximate cost of £1.82 in staff time. This results in an average cost saving of £13.35 per module description. The University currently has 4,179 ‘current’ modules in operation – if all were to fully implement single source information and publish information using the web services, this could see a saving of around £55,790 for the year.

 

There are immediate cost savings which are around efficiency as described above, however there is a larger one, relating to the need for a business case to be costed. This has been built into the requirements of PALET, incorporated into a Discipline Feasibility Study in order to overcome some of the superficial or visceral views that staff might have about the value and worth of a programme (the institution has established that up to 30% of new programmes don’t recruit more than 10 students). Such a study requires market research and the business case to be made for programme approval and to be signed off by a Head of School or an authority in a school. This will reduce the likelihood of programmes being developed and then finding it difficult to recruit students and hence lead to greater efficiencies.

 

“So arguably it’s allowed us to employ LEAN effectively in this area, it’s allowed us to do things like establish our key information sets rather more easily than we would have done before.”

 

“My sense is that what our experience of PALET has done for us is it’s allowed us to see how improvement in processes and procedures and the convergence of those, can lead to some significant savings.”

 

“PALET is one of the exemplars that demonstrate that LEAN works well.”

 

“PALET has identified a lot of associations ranging from student recruitment and student information, through course design, business case modelling, capturing information for KIS and things like that, and what PALET has allowed is a dedicated response to this multiplicity of elements which overlay themselves on PALET. And I think if I were to capture it, it’s been about this convergence, which has been far greater than might have been anticipated if we’d tried to do parallel work on each one of these areas at the same time.”

 

Impact on institutional management and wider engagement

The project will naturally be sustained and embedded as the processes are built into the Student Information System and web-based materials, KIS data etc.

 

The PALET project will be a very valuable component of the next QAA institutional review (2014).

 

The PALET project will be useful to the sector, particularly in relation to (a) the versatility of the student information system, (b) the ease of capturing KIS data, (c) the ability to publish information from a single sources of data and use it in multiple ways and (d) that systems and processes can influence behaviour in the university.

 

“I think a very influential part of PALET is going to be what we do next, and that’s about curriculum design and it’s about the holistic character of curricula. One of the consequences of modularity has been a sort of deconstruction of Degree programmes, a degree of independent ownership of components, but the ability to synthesise those into a coherent degree is gradually eroded. And I think that isn’t beneficial to the student experience, it’s certainly not responsive to the external changes which take place, and what PALET has now done is introduced a series of criteria, a series of questions that need to be articulated in programme design or programme re-design.”

 

“This for me has been an example of how investment in innovation has been able to change the way in which we operate. And that, partly be serendipity and partly by a deliberateness, has aligned with many other aspects of what the institution needs to be doing.”

 

“Systems and processes can influence behaviour in the university.”