“Blend your Module” – Getting started with ABC Curriculum Design

Over the past fortnight, we have revived LearningX (now in its own home), and have created “Blend Your Module”

This has been, and still is a work in progress, trying to take apart the ABC Curriculum design, developed originally by UCL to work for Dundee. We know that learning and teaching is going to be much more blended going forward than it has been before – but we don’t know what the blend will be. It’s useful to consider what we mean by blended learning, as the definition has changed over the years. Steve Wheeler sums it up at the start of a section in a short course.

One major issue when thinking about next academic year is that we don’t know how much on campus time students and staff will have. You’ll notice that I’m using “on campus” rather than face to face – as video now allows for “face to face” – at a distance. The QAA recently produced a taxonomy for Digital Learning, which is well worth reading.

The idea, therefore is to enable staff to develop activities that students could undertake online – but could easily be moved to a classroom.

In Blend your Module, we’ve taken the materials developed (as Creative Commons) by UCL and others, and looked at how they could be adapted to the needs of Dundee. The approach we’ve taken is a series of short posts, open to anyone, covering different aspects of redesigning your module. Community contribution to these ideas is very important – and you’ll see that we’re asking questions of you – such as experiences you’ve had learning online, or experiences when working with students on, or indeed offline. I’ve mentioned earlier that it’s a work in progress, as you feed back to us what you feel is also needed, so we’ll update the content of the blog.

As recipes are created by others in the CTIL and wider teams, so we’ll be linking to them in the relevant blog posts. As other content becomes available during the summer so we’ll be linking to that, too.

As you work through these activities, ideally with others, you can start to build up a set of resources that you’ll be using in your teaching, so that when the new module shells are ready, you’ve got content ready prepared to add to them.

However, none of this will work without you! We need your contributions to the posts, your comments to allow us to further enhance what we’re doing.

You may be asking “what’s learningX”? It’s an informal learning community that we set up a few years ago. For a number of reasons (time, mostly, rather than ideas), it laid dormant for a while. Now, however, is an ideal time to revive it, to support you all as you are adapting your modules for the “new normal” (I welcome other suggestions for that phrase, as I really don’t like it!)

Podcast – The Big Blether

Have a listen to our first Learning X podcast reflecting on the Blend your module resource and reflecting on how well the academic community has responded to the demands placed on them.

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