Dr Simon Paul Atkinson (PFHEA)
Enhancing Institutional Outcomes
This week’s Substack resource provides an outline for a workshop that brings together faculty to explore one of the most pressing challenges in contemporary higher education: how to design courses that remain meaningful, rigorous, and relevant in a rapidly changing world. Through a series of structured provocations and collaborative discussions, participants will examine the forces …
Continue reading “Designing for the Future: A Curriculum Horizon-Scanning Workshop”
The Challenge of Course Design All learning designers are essentially futurists. This is because the student who embarks on your designed course will not develop the skills and attributes you anticipated until they have completed it. If your course is part of a multi-year degree, you need to be thinking about a future that might …
Continue reading “Why is it important to have a learning design team focused on the future?”
First posted on Substack The AI arms race still rages. Students will identify AI writing support tools, educators will rearm themselves with AI-aware plagiarism-detection software, and students will source apps that can bypass the detection software. Institutions are increasingly prioritising the ease with which mass assessments can be marked. Governments are revising legislation that banned …
Continue reading “Ipsative Portfolio Assessment: a response to AI”
FIRST PUBLISHED ON SUBSTACK In 2007, I was invited to deliver a ‘keynote’ at the opening of the National e-Learning Centre in Zagreb, Croatia. I was then the Head of e-Learning and the Head of the Centre for Learning Development at the University of Hull. I argued then that the “e” in e-learning should stand …
Continue reading “Building Beautiful Learning – a Manifesto”
During the Empower Learners for the Age of AI (ELAI) conference earlier in December 2022, it became apparent to me personally that not only does Artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to revolutionize the field of education, but that it already is. But beyond the hype and enthusiasm there are enormous strategic policy decisions to …
Continue reading “Empower Learners for the Age of AI: a reflection”
One characteristic of a four to five year Learning and Teaching Strategy (LTS) is that it should require a complete re-write when it comes up for renewal. Given the inevitable pace of change, any remotely ambitious strategy is likely to have several ‘not achieved’ elements when it comes up for review. If you can sign-off …
Continue reading “University Learning and Teaching Strategies Post-Covid”
Short vodcast (3’25”) outlining four dimensions to the choices of media that IDs and academic faculty might consider as they make selections to support student learning. Originally a vodcast to accompany internal development it is long enough to provoke some reflective practice, short enough not to waste your time! It invites educational practitioners to think …
Continue reading “Basics of Media Choice in Teaching (Vodcast 3’25”)”
Strategic Directions in Higher, Vocational and Professional Education: Exploring Contexts
[See Courses on Educational Taxonomies] We hear much about the changing world of work and how slow higher and professional education is to respond. So in an increasingly competitive global market of Higher Apprenticeships and work-based learning provision I began to take a particular interest in students’ ‘graduateness’. What had begun as an exploratory look …
1% of the World’s Population has a College education? I’ve been looking recently at some of the policy declarations around millennium goals and development targets. It’s confusing and, at times, contradictory. I came across this rather nice, succinct, if unreferenced, account which struck me as worth contemplating (and verifying). “If we could shrink the earth’s …
Continue reading “1% of the World’s Population has a college education.”