Dear All,

We are moving away from the established delivery pattern of the academic year, away from terms, periods semesters in other words, towards 30 weeks of scheduled learning activities.  This should be an opportunity for teaching staff to review how courses are structured and delivered in a way that balances the requirements of content with those of the teaching and learning processes.  For example, course leaders are being urged to consider different patterns of unit delivery and the value of whole week events for employability, student run conferences etc.  

There are clearly serious challenges here, particularly in overcoming the practical issues involved in creating course delivery structures that will ensure that students can be engaged actively and directly in scheduled learning activities over 30 weeks.  For example we have a number of teams who would like to move from a diet of 'long thin units' to block teaching with regular summative assessment throughout the year, but this raises issues around staffing and student workload that I probably don't need to describe here.

Nevertheless the notion of 30 weeks scheduled learning activities gives considerable scope for different models of delivery and an opportunity to explore solutions to problems of this sort. A colleague and I have been asked to produce some guidance, specifically to identify and describe as many different approaches to course structure and delivery as possible.  We would like this to include tangible examples and I would be very interested to hear from anyone who is going through changes to course delivery structures or trying something new. Not least of all, I'd be interested in finding out about problems encountered and how they were overcome.  At the same time I'd be delighted to hear about any ideas, however outré for how we might deliver courses in this 30 week framework.

Dave

Dr David Barber
 Curriculum Learning and Teaching Developer
 Maritime and Technology Faculty
 Southampton Solent University
 t.02380319706  (3706)