Keeping up with developing practice emerging out of JISC's curriculum design programme

The 12th May 2010 Programme Meeting in Birmingham of the 12 projects that make up JISC’s Curriculum Design Programme looked at  key challenges in delivering a flexible curriculum agenda.

Discussions and presentations focused on the management of course information, timetabling and academic workload. These are all areas that are being addressed at the University of Greenwich and the UG-Flex project is a part of the broader debate and dialogue and plays a role in pulling together the key players through project meetings and consultation activities.

For example, our director of Personnel is leading a project to develop and pilot a new academic workload model at Greenwich (as part of the wider “Managing Academic Workload” project coordinated from Salford University) and we are looking forward to a presentation on this at the next UG-Flex Steering Group meeting in June.

I find the JISC programme meetings often produce interesting discussions and opportunities for reflection. This meeting proved to be an opportunity for me to reflect how my communication priorities and techniques will need to change now we’ve faced up to the fact that UG-Flex won’t and can’t solve all of the issues it has surfaced. I think there is an imperative for UG-Flex to work even harder to share knowledge and information with colleagues at Greenwich on the emerging practice and ideas on technology supported innovations in curriculum design emerging from the other projects.

To this end, I'm posting a list of resources for keeping in touch with the developing practice emerging out of the curriculum design programme.

http://delicious.com/ugflexproject   I’ve used this social bookmarking service to collect together details of the web sites and/or blogs of the 12 curriculum design projects. As well as the projects in our cluster, I am finding University of Ulster’s Viewpoints project, Strathclyde’s PiP project and Bolton’s Coeducation project very interesting and relevant at the moment

http://www.netvibes.com/dcb09#DCB_09  Another resource created by a colleague from Cardiff where it is possible to keep track of most of the CDD project blogs (and Circle, Twitter feeds etc.). Unlike delicious bookmarks, Netvibes also gives you a “quick view” of the content of the blogs so you can be a bit more selective.

http://jisccdd.jiscinvolve.org/  The JISC CDD programme’s own blog and gives a broader perspective of curriculum design and delivery issues. And as well as more links to the 12 curriculum design projects they have links to the curriculum delivery projects.