The curriculum design process – LEAP

At the recent Association for Learning Technology (ALT) conference, I attended a workshop on curriculum design which I thought would work very well at BU.

Arena Blended Connected (ABC) is described as “an effective and engaging hands-on workshop that has now been trialled with great success over a range of programmes. In just 90 minutes using a game format teams are able to work together to create a visual ‘storyboard’ outlining the type and sequence of learning activities (both online and offline) required to meet the module’s learning outcomes. ABC is particularly useful for new programmes or those changing to an online or more blended format.”

This picture links to a video introduction to ABC:

My short introduction was both engaging and effective.  As a result, we are planning to trial ABC at BU to assess how it can help us at unit and programme levels and with curriculum design/redesign.

The resources needed to run the workshops are available online.  All ABC resources are released under Creative Commons

ABC is based on education research and funded projects:

  • Learning types.  Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York and London: Routledge.  There is a video here explaining the 6 learning types (acquisition, inquiry, discussion, practice, collaboration and production) that are used as the basis for describing the unit structure in the workshop.
  • Connected Curriculum.  Dilly Fung, UCL Arena Centre for Research-based Education, UCL 2014
  • Viewpoints project (2008-2013).  JISC funded, Lead by University of Ulster
  • ABC LD, Curriculum design workshop and resources.  Clive Young and Nataša Perović, Digital Education, UCL, 2015

We are working on a BU-specific version of ABC which is expected to be called the Learning Excellence Acceleration Programme (LEAP) for release in November.

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