Updates on the Co:Lab Curriculum Design Process at Brighton

It has been a very rewarding academic year in the Learning and Teaching Hub’s ongoing work supporting course and module teams in their curriculum design activities. 

Throughout 2023/24 we have supported courses preparing for Periodic Review including the UG Business management pathways, UG English literature course pathways, the PG Cert Leading Practice Education, and new courses preparing for validation including BSc Data Analytics and HTQ Construction site supervision. 

The Co:Lab Course design workshops continue to provide valuable opportunities and quality time for course teams to have in-depth discussions about their learning, teaching and assessment practices. The L&T Hub’s facilitation enables effective collaboration, bringing ideas for pedagogic and digital innovation and reminders of institutional policies which spark ideas for practice. We continue to be struck by the value of time spent together on campus for these discussions, and the importance of building course team relationships for effective collaboration. Students have continued to be involved as partners in these workshops. A highlight this year was the participation of 7 students in the workshops for the English literature pathways. Students openly shared their own experiences of the course and engaged in rich dialogue with staff throughout the workshop. Aspects of the course requiring enhancement were highlighted and students made fantastic suggestions which brought encouragement and direction to the course team.  

To share some aspects of curriculum design that we have been supporting teams in, the English Literature courses have been exploring the redesign of assessment tasks to involve a greater ‘authenticity’ and application of skills in potential future employment contexts for graduates. Joe Shelton from Careers joined the discussions to suggest where case studies and live briefs from a variety of industry settings could help to bring aspects of the curriculum to life more. The University’s Global Challenges agenda sparked interesting discussions with the BSc Data Science team examining the aspects of the course curriculum that are opportunities to develop students’ wider global engagement with more international industry case studies. We also supported the PG Cert in Leading Practice Education team as they discussed the implications of aligning with the new AdvanceHE’s UK Professional Standards Framework and complexities of multiple applicant pathways. 

At a Module level, a programme of interdisciplinary Co:Lab Module Design workshops (Part 1: Aims, Learning Outcomes and Assessments and Part 2: Learning Activities & Technologies) were delivered throughout the academic year in collaboration with the Learning Technologists. We have been reflecting as a team that a more bespoke provision of these module design workshops for course teams going through validation or review would be beneficial so will be focusing on this development for 2024/25.  

The University of Brighton’s quality assurance and enhancement process is changing, moving from periodic review cycles to a new Enhancement-Led Subject Review process (UoB only link). Co:Lab Curriculum Design support will continue to be embedded within this process, with all teams going through the process of validation, or a focused revisions being offered the full provision of support. Our provision of Co:Lab workshops will be flexible, for some courses, subject level workshops will be most useful if they share a high number of modules or pathways, whilst for other courses workshops will be delivered individually to allow an in-depth of focus on the curriculum.  

Disseminating our Co:Lab practice this year, Juliet Eve and Lucy Chilvers have been conducting qualitative research exploring the principles informing process of curriculum design, which they disseminated at the Educational Research and Scholarship Symposium in January 2024, and soon at the upcoming SEDA Curriculum Design Symposium in June at the University of Warwick. We are also delighted to see Co:Lab referenced in the recent JISC report “Beyond Blended: rethinking curriculum and learning design” by Helen Beetham and Sheila McNeil’s (2024) alongside other established models including Carpe Diem and the ABC Model.  

If you would like to find out more about the Co:Lab Curriculum Design Process, you can read this previous blog article and for University of Brighton colleagues, visit our internal Co:Lab Sharepoint page for information on booking on to workshops. If you would like to request a bespoke workshop to meet your team’s needs, please get in touch with Lucy Chilvers. L.R.Chilvers@brighton.ac.uk