Designing Engaging Learning Opportunities
Workshop aligned to UKPSF A1-A2, K1-K4, V1
The third element in a constructively aligned course design and stage six of the 8-SLDF is the learning activities that allow students to prepare for the assessment of their learning outcomes. This is not about the content that we share with our students; it is about how we develop an appropriate strategy to do that. Some modules will require a good deal of knowledge to be acquired by novice learners and a set-text and discursive seminars may be the appropriate strategy. Could we use one-minute papers, ‘Pecha Kucha’, lightning talks, and other techniques to secure student engagement? Alternatively, we might be designing a more advanced module in which a discovery learning approach is more appropriate. Could we use enquiry based learning models here instead, asking our students to prepare to take a debate position, run a Moot or team-based discussion? The important thing is that we are developing a strategy and practical approaches that build on our design, not seeking innovation for innovation’s sake. The pages for this stage of the 8 Stage Learning Design Framework are summarised as:
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- The content to be taught should serve the students ability to evidence the ILO
- The skills and attributes that are taught at a topic, week or session level should be designed to rehearse elements of the assessment
- Not everything that engages students is directly assessed but everything they are asked to do should be justifiable as informing the assessment and ILOs.
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You might want to ask yourself as a course design team
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- How closely mapped are the ILOs to each topic, week or session outline?
- How confident are you that you cover the ILOs appropriately in terms of weighting and importance?
- How much variation is there in the learning approaches taken throughout your module?
- How are you enabling students to develop skills beyond knowledge acquisition?
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See 8-SLDF pages for a fuller explanation.
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