Author: Learning Design Team

Key questions to ask

STUDENTS
• Who are your learners? • What is their starting point? What are the enablers and barriers to learning? • What outcomes do they need to achieve? • What will they do to learn? • How will you measure success?

INCLUSION & DIVERSITY
• What do you want the student experience to be? • How will you create a sense of belonging and bring students on a journey? • What opportunities will learners have to draw on and share their own experiences? • How will you embed wellbeing into the curriculum? • How can you offer flexibility and choice to learners in achieving outcomes and demonstrating their learning?

SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
• What skills do students need to develop in order to learn effectively, build confidence and achieve their ambitions? • How will you contextualise and integrate skills into the curriculum? • What activities will enable students to develop and practise their skills, and prepare for assessment? • What activities will you include to enable students to make their own discoveries?

LEARNING COMMUNITY
• How will you promote interactions with others and encourage learners to collaborate and find answers together? • How are collaborative activities structured, to aid the collaborative process and keep students motivated to complete them? • What support will students need before, during and after any collaborative activities or groupwork? • How can you build a supportive learning community on a shared journey?

TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY
• How will tools, technology and media be integrated? • What tools and technology are students already using? • Which tool or technology will serve your pedagogical purposes best? • How will you ensure the journey for students is smooth and avoids overload?

Quizzes aren’t just for testing knowledge. They also encourage students to recall their course material, apply it and reflect on the feedback they’re given, whichin turn prompts learning. This is known as the testing effect’ and there’s plenty of research (including a paper by Roediger and Karpicke (2006)) that explores it.

Use our quick tips to explore how quizzes can build understanding and when to use a quiz for maximum impact.

1. Diagnostic quizzes
   Include a diagnostic quiz at the start of your course to give students the opportunity to self-assess their skills and knowledge. You can use feedback to prompt students to reflect on whether they’re ready for the course, which topics they might want to review and/or to direct them to preparation materials.
2. Consolidation quizzes
   Use consolidation quizzes at the end of blocks of study to prompt students to review on the material they’ve covered. You can also use them to break up material into small chunks, providing students with an opportunity to think back on a recent topic.  You should aim to give formative feedback (feedback that prompts students reflect on their learning and redirects them to materials they need to review). Consolidation quizzes should be low stakes: their aim is to encourage students to think about their learning, not to assess their knowledge formally.
3. Formative assessment
   Use formative quizzes as part of your assessment strategy. Like consolidation quizzes, they’re designed to check students’ understanding and provide formative feedback, but unlike consolidation quizzes, they focus on evaluating students’progress towards the course learning outcomes rather than a section of material. Consider keeping them low- or no stakes to encourage students to benefit from reflecting on their progress without being penalised.
4. Summative assessment
   Summative assessments are end-of-course quizzes or assessments that check whether students have reached the learning outcomes. As with other kinds of quiz, it’s important to provide feedback – especially as students may not engage with this material again for a while. Make sure feedback addresses any misconceptions and signposts to other helpful material.

The Open University’s mission is to be open to people, places, methods and ideas. We have a similar role as learning designers: we’re committed to meeting the needs of all students.

Inclusive curriculum is at the heart of this. Here are the three principles developed by the OU’s Access, Participation and Success team to guide curriculum development.

1. Ensure all students can access the curriculum by:
   Checking that all material uses inclusive language, and that new and complex terms are clearly explained. A glossary is useful.
2. Ensure that all students see themselves reflected by:
   Drawing from sources that reflect a wide range of diversity
   Allowing students to bring in their diverse experiences and backgrounds to contribute to the learning and assessment activities.
3. Ensure students are equipped to participate in a diverse world by:
   Exposing them to a range of culturally challenging opinions and contexts
   Providing structured opportunities to build understanding of and respect
   for diversity and the contribution diversity makes in an international context.

Students are at the heart of learning design. Part of the role of the learning design team is to explore students’ needs through data and research. We then work with module authors and other colleagues to to advise
on how these needs can be met.

1. Curriculum design student panel
   Our student panel now has nearly 3,000 members. They provide feedback on activities, tools and learning materials so that our course teams can design for students’ real experiences.
2. Building student profiles
   We provide data and research to help module teams design student profiles that capture students’ goals and challenges. They can refer to these throughout module development to ensure they’re addressing students’ needs.
3. Student experience workshops
   We work with module teams to help them reflect on students’ perspectives and what support and resources students might need to succeed.
4. Real-time student feedback
   We advise module teams on how to gather student feedback while courses are live. They can then respond to students’ comments immediately and in future courses.
5. Student-focused scholarship
   We carry out research into students’ needs and perspectives so that we can share these (often via our blog) with module teams and learning design teams outside The Open University.