Designing Courses (P02200)

? Credit Points : 10 ? SCQF Level : 11 ? Acronym : EDU-P-P02200

This unit will focus on the design and development of courses, particularly but not exclusively at undergraduate level. It will include consideration of the vertical and horizontal relationships of courses with the rest of the curriculum and students programmes of study. Emphasis will also be placed on the challenges for students in engaging fully with course content and processes, and how design decisions can enable the structuring and scaffolding of effective student learning.
The course will give participants the opportunity to critically examine key issues which arise and need to be resolved when designing new courses or redesigning existing ones. They will develop a keen awareness of the underpinning theoretical considerations and their implications for practice. At the same time the requirement to apply their knowledge and understanding by working with the development of a particular course will sharpen participants appreciation of the affordances and constraints of contextual features, and encourage them to develop creative responses to real-life challenges.
Participants will be encouraged to expand their repertoire of strategies and practical approaches by moving outside their familiar frameworks and engaging in investigation and discussion across disciplinary boundaries. The course will also help advance participants ability to communicate in appropriate ways to peers, senior colleagues and students the underlying rationales for choices made between competing possibilities.

Entry Requirements

? This course is not available to visting students.

? Pre-requisites : For new lecturers participation in the two day orientation to teaching at the University of Edinburgh offered by the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment is a course requirement.

? Special Arrangements for Entry : Pre-course reading, in-course reading as well as assignment preparation complement face-to-face teaching/learning activities to a total of 100 notional effort hours.

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Education, (The Moray House School of Education, Schedule C)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : Postgraduate

? Delivery Period : Full Year (Blocks 1-4)

? Contact Teaching Time : 6 hour(s) per week for 2 weeks

? Other Required Attendance : 44 hour(s) per week for 2 weeks

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

Successful completion of the course will enable participants to demonstrate:
- analytical engagement with key issues and writings on course design and development
- alertness to students perspectives, their orientations and the challenges they face
- critical reflection on course purposes and their articulation, with course activities and assessment both conceptually and within specific contexts
- awareness of ways of monitoring, reviewing and taking forward course development
- appropriate attention to the place of a course in an overall programme of study and issues of progression

Assessment Information

Participants will need to liaise in advance with the option tutors in order to decide what course unit or programme will be a suitable focus for their face-to-face and follow-up work. There will be one main assessment with a choice between two kinds of tasks (A. or B.).

A. the designed/redesigned course descriptor with an accompanying analytical commentary (up to 2000 words).

B. the designed/redesigned course descriptor plus a reflective analysis (up to 2000 words) which capitalises on and takes forward issues and insights from the course design/redesign exercise.