Module Organisation

The Guided Learner Journey (GLJ) module provides a step-by-step approach in supporting staff with their module design, development, and management. The module contains a number of units to focus staff on key activities such as developing inclusive and accessible learning strategies or building reading lists using a decolonising lens. The GLJ is designed to cover three key steps of designing and running modules –

1. Getting Started.
2. Delivering the Module.
3. Evaluating the Module.

Getting Started - In this phase we purposefully organise resources and learning activities to support the setting up of a module. This includes, but is not limited to useful checklists, videos on how to undertake certain activities, guides on navigating the canvas site and ideas for enhancing and enriching the module activities.

Delivering the Module - This phase enables staff to consider how best to manage a module once it begins. Once again, this step contains resources, guides and ideas on how to manage the module cycle and learning activities.

Evaluating the Module - Provides the guidance, resources and checklists to enable evaluation of the module and planning/reflection for next steps.

Within this approach, information, ideas and resources are presented in a user-friendly fashion to support staff in easily locating information and navigating the content efficiently. Through the GLJ staff should become more familiar with module design, delivery and evaluation.

Communicating with students on the module covers more than just sending messages about the module.  How the module site is constructed and used to guide learning are important and should be communicated to students. The module’s structure should have a coherent design, underpinned by principles of constructive alignment and patchwork learning so each stage of the module logically follows on from each other like a story; this then helps students make sense of what is going on at each stage of their journey through the module. Finally, we encourage that communication with students to be a two-way, dialogic process whereby students see that module teams are present on the module and that they can engage with them. For example, incorporating discussion pages is a good way to promote this approach.

Our approach to the design and organisation of the module ensures that learning, teaching and assignment are as aligned to the intended learning outcomes with formative learning opportunities. Including the use of formative assignments within the design and delivery of the module provides students an opportunity to check their understanding at regular stages.  This helps our students to build up confidence ahead of summative assessments and allows us to monitor their engagement and progress, and identify where support may be needed.

As part of our principle of ensuring coherent design of modules, assignments are set up at the start of term so that staff and students know what to expect. This enables students to plan the year ahead and ensure that external commitments can be managed around assignment commitments.  We also organise assignment dates at a programme level to help avoid unnecessary bunching of submission dates and marking periods.  This programme level assessment landscape is also communicated to students so that they can see this information for all of their modules in one place to further help them organise their studies and external commitments.

Utilising our resource list platform, Talis, which is integrated into Canvas, each module’s resources are organised within each module topic or unit so that students easily know what resources to draw on at each stage of their progression through the module’s content and it can be viewed in the context of the surrounding classes and related module material. Each resource in the list is labelled to indicate its importance for the upcoming class and notes attached to the resource indicate why it is part of the preparation and what students will gain from it.  To help students organise their time and allow for flexible study, each resource indicates the number of pages to read, or its duration if an audio-visual resource.

When organising our modules and constructing module sites, it is important that we ensure that inclusive teaching practices are at the heart of it all so that our resources are accessible for all of our students, regardless of their personal circumstances.  All assignments are quality assured internally by programme teams and our external assessors and must be designed from an ‘Inclusive-First’ approach so they are as flexible as possible and take account of potential disabilities amongst the students undertaking them. This occurs before disseminating the assignments to students.