Exploring Curriculum Design Approaches

Recently at the University of Bristol, we’ve all been thinking a lot about learning design, developing curriculum and ways of assessment. BILT’s focus on TESTA for transforming assessment is one way you can see this in action. In higher education, learning design can quickly get complicated – for example redesigning a whole programme – and is increasingly new and exciting – with online or blended aspects, new assessment methods or innovative pedagogies. A method of working when approaching curriculum, programme or learning design can speed up the process and make it much more enjoyable for everyone involved. Helpfully, there are several working methods based on story-boarding which provide a way to navigate this process, and which focus on a team approach to designing learning.

The Digital Education Office have mainly used an approach based on UCL’s ABC: you can read more about our use of this method from a series of blog posts by Suzi Wells and I on a previous ABC conference held at UCL. 

Such curriculum design approaches all facilitate discussion and evaluation of current and future learning designs by bringing together relevant stakeholders, learning design specialists and support staff. In the Sway presentation embedded here, we’ll have a quick look at a few, in order to get a taste of what these approaches involve, and how they’ve been used by others. Follow this link to open the Sway in a new tab or window.