We held a Learning Excellence (LEAP) session with twelve colleagues from the programme team in the current Department of Events and Leisure last week. The goal was to work on new undergraduate and postgraduate programmes starting in Sept 2019. Unit teaching teams worked with new Intended Learning Outcomes and their knowledge from current units to map out the vertical and horizontal content, learning strategies and assessments on the new units.
Conversations centred on what the team wanted students to learn and how best to design sessions. This was informed by drivers such as the university’s new 6C assessment policy, the BU2025 strategy, and the TEF. We discussed various learning approaches across different levels of study alongside topics of inclusivity, co-creation, personalisation and sustainability.
The team addressed different individual and group learning activities, debating blended approaches of integrated technology into the learning activities. After the first layer of teaching methods to drive learning we moved to another layer of assessment for learning with greater appreciations of the value of communicating to students onformative assessment, real-world assessments and feedback/ feed-forward – all of which drive learning.
A benefit of the visual mapping process of LEAP across the years of study was that teams could see potential areas of overlap and how to articulate to students how their unit content built on previous units.
This was a positive, vibrant workshop and comments included
- FABULOUS – my second time doing it and I think it is a very valuable exercise to update and be current
- Thought provoking
- Interesting
- Challenges us to think about different ways of doing
People outside BU are talking about how valuable the LEAP design is and we were joined by Katalin Hanniker, a digital learning designer from the University of Surrey to observe LEAP in action! She shared that “This gave me a great introduction to the very different types of questions and concerns that arise during the activity mapping stage. I will capture these and consider how I can introduce them into my own practice.”
Previous posts about past LEAP sessions can be read here.
If you would like to learn more about embedding Learning Excellence in your programmes please contact Curie Scott
Here are the pictures from today:
An completed unit after LEAP
Curie Scott, Janet Dickinson and Debbie Sadd having fun!
