Over the past few months, CILT have been facilitating some rapid development curriculum design workshops across the colleges, based on the ABC Learning Design process. Workshops are facilitated and supported by a range of CILT staff from the Online Learning Team, Academic Development Team, Educational Quality Team, and Careers and Employability, together with input from the Library, to provide a multi-faceted approach to curriculum design alongside topic teaching staff.

The fast-paced format uses Laurillard’s (2012) six different learning types (see Table 1), part of the ‘Conversational Framework’, to create a topic storyboard (see Figure 1), typing and sequencing both online and offline learning activities to meet topic learning outcomes.

Workshops have been held with Biotechnology, Speech Pathology and two of the HASS Honours programs. Most recently, Physiotherapy participated in our first completely online version of the workshop with great success. Over the course of the 2-hour workshop, 9 topics were redesigned, formative and summative assessments sequenced, and underlying course themes mapped to the topics. This has allowed for a rapid, collaborative redesign of course topics. The storyboard format provides a colourful, visual representation of topics in the course, allowing the course coordinator to get a great visual overview of where assessments are located, the consistency in learning activities, and the presence of required themes underpinning and across the course as a whole. It creates a great way for topic coordinators to keep abreast of how their topic relates with those around it within the course.

After the design process has been completed, sharing how each topic is constructed becomes quick and enjoyable. These plans can then be used to build the topic in FLO and revisit the design at a later stage to make improvements.

Table 1: Laurillard’s six learning types

Figure 1: Example storyboard

If your course is interested in exploring the ABC Learning Design curriculum design process to either map or redesign topics, please contact the Learning Designer in your college.

 

Cassandra Hood, Academic Developer – CILT

Jackie Cornell, Learning Designer – CILT