Curriculum Mapping & Assessment Blueprinting to improve Quality

Dr Vicky GunnDirectorLearning and Teaching Centre

Curriculum reform: Historically recurring themes

Specialisation: Growth of the

disciplines

Generalist

education &

culture generati

on

• Creation of a good society

• Generation of manners / mores

• Association with ‘State’; strength of democracy

• Cultivation of cultured professionals

• Accountability to funders (politics)

• Work-force production/ graduate attributes/ global citizenship

• Importance of increasing knowledge through specialisation;

• To serve science (wissenschaft);

• Sustaining the knowledge economy

Open curriculum (implicit links between curriculum architecture)

Subject area,

School, College ‘bench-marks’

Arts, Human-

ities, Social

Sciences

Mixed approach

Pharma-cology

Regulatory body & School

Closed curriculum (explicit structures)

Professional degrees: regulatory

bodies

Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Allied Healthcare

How does assessment

in these different types of

curriculum cultivate

links between subject

content and fostering graduate

attributes?

University of Glasgow Context: Enhancement themes case studies

Managing the paradoxes: CMAB

• Prioritise: disciplinary engagement (staff and students) in the first instance;

• Focus on: assessment and feedback as the vehicle to improve links to the University’s GAs;

• Work within: a long term ‘stealth’ plan – systematic linking of teaching enhancement projects to one direction

What we’ve learned from working with Enhancement Themes:

Why this choice for managing engagement?

Disciplinary priorities around learning and teaching are not always homogenous:

• orientations to different educational outcomes expressed within them;

• need to harness this to generate change that comes from within the clusters as well as using centralised ‘pushes’.

See: Gunn & Fisk (2013) Considering Teaching Excellence in Higher Education: 2007-2013, p. 14.

Processes

• Scholarly review of literature

• Curriculum audit: paper trail – initial mapping and blueprinting

ILOs, GAs, Assessment types, feedback opportunities

• Conversations (interviews, focus groups, workshops)

• Reiterating audit

• Facilitating action plan generation

Example CMAB: Initial stage AB

First yr C1 First yr C2 2nd yr C1 2nd yr C2

Essay/exam

Familiar methods = comfort

Essay/ presn. Reflective portfolio built over time

DISRUPTION

Essay/ exam

Relief, back into comfort zone

Essay/ exam Essay/ exam Essay/ exam Essay/ exam

Essay/presentation

Essay/ exam Essay/ exam Essay-like pieces

Any cross course assmts?

Understanding the bigger

picture from the parts:

Then map to ILOS/ GAs

Indicative only- not an actual programme

Kept reminding ourselves of:

Quality bureaucracy words of

“What is actually done in the classroom and what is said in quality documentation

is not always the same thing”

Next stage: mainstreaming

• Embed in quality assurance processes: Periodic subject review?

• Have as part of the action plan of large-scale teaching oriented interventions and strategies

• Use outcomes to inform Personal Tutors/ Advisers of Studies and their subsequent conversations with students

• Students?