Today’s session was really interesting and useful, It made me realise the way the learning outcomes are set up in UAL. I come from a FE background where Learning Objectives tend to be very regimented and specific, especially in the limited teaching I have done in level 1 IT, the students are expected to attain a set of specific skills, and they either have learned them or not.

In the training I do, it’s similar by the end of the session, I would make sure that the learners have attained the skills that I wanted. Looking at Bloom’s taxonomies, most of the sessions I run would focus on the first three levels, remembering, understanding and applying. I’m always very interested to see in follow-up sessions where staff have gone away and repurposed the skills/system that I have taught them, to be used in a way that best suits them, sometimes in completely different ways that I had not thought of myself. It’s great to be able to incorporate these new ways into further sessions expanding the usefulness of the sessions.

I have found that the DCAF digital creative attributes framework is really helpful to give staff a real anchor for their sessions to hang from. During the pandemic, it was something we suggested to a number of members of staff, but it wasn’t picked up by many. More recently the open (online) courses project has used it heavily in their course design and I feel that the staff involved with setting up the 3-week courses have benefited from using the DCAF.  We used it with MIRO to help staff pick up the attributes and place them around the board to help them focus and reflect on what attributes are needed in the sessions and aid them with the course design. I do think it is a system that staff get the most out of when they can split up their planning and move the attributes around to fit the sections, either online on a massive whiteboard, like Miro, or as small physical cards that can be moved around an actual whiteboard. It works really well as an activity for a single person and for a group.

I have been working on creating a report and guidance on how CCW does online assessment, mainly around the handing in process, at the moment there is too much variation in the setup and this is reflected in issues that appear around student submission.

We are very keen to improve the process and allow more interesting and innovative work to be submitted online for assessment.

At the moment, a number of courses need the students to submit a portfolio as a limited size PDF, regardless of what they have been working on. We want to move away from students having to adapt their work so that it fits the submission process, rather than submitting their work as it should be and we find ways to make sure that the submission is viable.

References

Anon, (n.d.). Digital Creative Attributes Framework – A staff guide to using the DCAF for teaching and learning. [online] Available at: https://dcaf.myblog.arts.ac.uk/.