Although I’m still trying to find time to rewrite S151 Maths for Science (hence the previous posts about students’ mathematical misconceptions) I am also incredibly busy with other things. Last week I attended two external meetings, both excellent, so I’ll take a bit of a break from the maths to talk about these.
On Wednesday I was at a meeting of the JISC Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group. I have only recently been invited to join this group, so I headed to Birmingham with some trepidation, but it was a superb meeting and I met some inspirational people (very few of whom I’d met previously) – and everyone was friendly. It’s difficult to pick the best from the excellent presentations and workshops I attended, but one that has already proved useful was a session led by Alan Masson of the University of Ulster, about the Viewpoints Project. From their own blurb…’the Viewpoints Project provides practitioners with a series of simple user-friendly tools that promote a creative and effective approach to the curriculum design process.’ Simple indeed – we spent some time discussing sets of cards on ‘Good assesment and feedback practice’ (based on the REAP principles) – discussing how we would use these in curriculum planning. But it was so effective (and has already led me to use cards in planning a curriculum change of our own). And so nice to see the encouragement to plan a curriculum holistically, based on sound principles (of assessment and feedback in this case, but there were other sets of cards too, which we’d have integrated if we’d had more time).