Category Archives: higher education

Viewpoints Methodology Workshop

Posted on by

Earlier today I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a Viewpoints Methodology workshop organised by Heather Gibson of QAA Scotland and facilitated by Alan Masson of the University of Ulster.

It was great to be able to attend the workshop as I’ve followed the development of Viewpoints since it was first funded by Jisc, as my former Cetis colleague Sheila MacNeill was responsible for supporting the Jisc Curriculum Design Programme and also sat on the project steering group.

Alan Mason began the workshop by introducing Viewpoints Curriculum Design process and tools.

“Viewpoints created themed workshops and reflective resources to inform, inspire and help teachers, support staff and learners plan effective curriculum designs. These resources are focused around four main areas: assessment and feedback, information skills, learner engagement and creativity in the curriculum. Each theme is underpinned by well-established pedagogical approaches and has been designed to help teams build ideas towards a more learner centred curriculum design model. They provide a series of simple, user friendly reflective tools and prompts that promote a creative and effective approach to the curriculum design process and help practitioners think about important stages for their students at different points on the learner timeline”

http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/Viewpoints/microsoft-word-viewpoints-institutionalstoryoctober12/1

Our activities today were centred on a couple of hypothetical course design scenarios and made use of resource cards based on my former CAPLE colleague, David Nicol’s REAP assessment and feedback principals. The Viewpoints methodology is centred on collaborative brainstorming and the process focuses on story boarding to encourage a dynamic creative process. Rather than creating specific outputs, Viewpoints workshops focus on facilitating transition and creating collaborative agreements.

IMG_3505

For the first task I joined a group that chose to explore college – university articulation and the objective we agreed to address was to design a course that would:

“Enable effective educational and social integration to facilitate better social / peer learning experiences in the context of college / university articulation”

IMG_3503

The whole process was really engaging and it didn’t take us long to create an innovative design that we all agreed on.

IMG_3500

Meanwhile, the other group chose to focus on Masters students and articulated their objective as follows.

“How do we get students to Masters level being / working?”

IMG_3506

For the second task I switched groups and joined the Masters group whose task was to explore how the learner attributes of “Masterness” (autonomy, depth, abstraction, complexity, research, unpredictability, professionalism) mapped on to the design structure.

IMG_3509

Although we spent the afternoon working on hypothetical scenarios, all participants agreed that the Viewpoints methodology has great potential and we were able to suggest many different scenarios where the methodology could be employed in addition to curriculum design. These included developing institutional strategy, project planning and aligning courses to UK PSF descriptors. All in all it was a really valuable workshop, so many thanks to Heather and Alan for organizing and facilitating it!

You can find out more about Viewpoints from the project blog here: http://viewpointsproject.blogspot.co.uk/ and the Curriculum Design Workshop resources are available here: http://wiki.ulster.ac.uk/display/VPR/Home 

Oh and one last thing, extra brownie points to the Viewpoints team for ensuring that all their resources are clearly marked with a Creative Commons licence!

THE Best University Workplace Survey

Posted on by

The Best University WorkplaceTimes Higher Education is currently in the process of undertaking a Best University Workplace Survey. The survey, which invites staff to “Tell us what you love (or loathe) about your institution”, aims to:

…find out which UK universities excel when it comes to keeping employees content – from pay levels to recognition of the extra hours staff put in. We also want to know how the experience of working in a university differs according to role, discipline, level of seniority, age, gender, terms of contract and other variables.

In an article about the survey THE editor John Gill is quoted as saying

“There are often reports and analyses on individual aspects of the working lives of university staff, but valuable though these are, they do not give the full picture, our aim for the THE Best University Workplace survey is to get a broad picture of what it is like to work in a UK university in 2013, but also to allow us to dig down into the data and assess how individual factors affect the experience of university staff at all levels and in all roles.”

Having just been made redundant by a higher education institution after sixteen years service, and having watched that institution comprehensively dismantle a highly rated and internationally recognised academic practice department, I think it’s fair to say that I was rather keen on contributing to the survey. Sadly, when I went to complete the survey I discovered that it’s restricted to current academic staff with a .ac.uk email address. No .ac.uk mail address, no submission, and ironically my institutional address had been shut down earlier that afternoon. Not only are ex-academic staff who no longer have a .ac.uk e-mail address prevented from responding, the survey is also constructed in such a way that respondents are encouraged submit data that relates to their current institution, rather than previous institutions they may have worked for. Although I can understand why THE has restricted the survey in this way, it’s a relatively simple way to authenticate submissions, I do think they are rather missing a trick. Given the amount of flux in the sector at present, I think it would be invaluable to record the experiences of staff who have been made redundant, jumped before they were pushed, or simply moved on to greener pastures.

THE have always proved to be very responsive on twitter, so I tweeted this suggestion to @timeshighered last night and was gratified to have an almost immediate response from THE journalist Chris Parr. Thanks also to Dr Cathryn Pearce for joining the debate.

THE_survey

I hope THE Best University Workplace survey is sufficiently successful for an updated version to run in subsequent years. Setting these quibbles aside, I think the survey is an excellent idea, and I’ll certainly be very interested to see the results. I’d also encourage colleagues to take a few minutes to complete the survey. Go on, you know you really want to tell THE how much you love, or loathe, your institution!