On the 28th of April, I (Theo) attended a JISC funded workshop about the work of two Pathfinder projects: the CABLE project (Change Academy for Blended Learning Enhancement) and the Carpe Diem project.
My understanding is that the core objective of these projects is to support educational institutions so as to effectively design, develop and deliver their teaching curriculum. The workshop made me realize something that is a bit broader in its scope and concerns the design and delivery of new ways of learning. Much of the discussion was centred on the realization that universities are quite conservative in their teaching approach. This doesn’t mean that universities are conservative in the content of their courses, but mainly in the learning experience they are offering and probably in their institutional ‘design’ process that leads to the development of such learning environments.
Nevertheless, I also have to say that I was surprised by the large extent to which these projects are dealing with issues of design, design methods or design thinking. Both projects seemed to be concerned with the development of a design methodology or some sort of ‘designerly way of thinking’ for developing learning environments. Although not always explicitly said, their concern was to identify methods for supporting collaboration and conflict resolution between different stakeholders (academic staff, administrators and students), supporting the identification of a vision or problem, supporting divergent/convergent thinking, prototyping and reflective thinking, just to mention some of the reoccurring themes. The workshop had a ‘hands-on’ approach which at some points created a feel of a design studio workshop.
I include the suggested readings from this workshop:
Anderson I, Bullen P, Alltree J. Thornton H (2008) CABLE: An approach to embedding blended learning in the curricula and across the institution Reflecting Education, 4(1)pp 30-41. Http://reflectingeducation.net
ARMELLINI, A. and JONES, S. (2008) Carpe Diem: seizing each day to foster change in e-learning design. Reflecting Education, Vol 4 (1) (pp. 17-29). Available at: http://tinyurl.com/58q2lj, last accessed 6th February 2009.
SALMON, G.; JONES, S. and ARMELLINI, A. (2008) Building institutional capability in e-learning design. ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology, Vol 16 (2) (pp. 95-109).