Introduction
The Higher Education Academy UK Subject Centre for Bioscience supports teaching in bioscience and related disciplines across all UK Higher Education to improve student learning in the biosciences. The Subject Centre's website provides vast amount of resources, including a database of bioscience teaching resources, an ImageBank of bioscience-related images free and copyright-cleared for use in education, over 360 credits worth of Open Educational Resources focused on laboratory and fieldwork learning, a set of case studies including 15 in e-learning, and reports from a range of funded e-learning projects.
On the Design Studio you can access reports from a number of Bioscience e-learning projects. You can also search for Design Studio assets specifically relevant to Bioscience here.
Curriculum design in Bioscience
Like many disciplines, it is more often a case of curriculum re-design, rather than straight design, whereby an ever-changing landscape demands the constant updating of an existing set of courses and related materials, under constantly tightening time-constraints.
However, in addition to the issues shared across many subjects, such as subject benchmark and professional requirements mapping, embedding employability and enhancing graduate attributes, a significant current challenge specific to bioscience revolves around the areas of laboratory and fieldwork, which are both very time-consuming and often simply impractical to carry out in a realistic time-frame, requiring innovative alternative experiences to be found for the students to ensure they are still able to achieve the appropriate learning outcomes for their modules.
To address this, the Subject Centre, in conjunction with ten partner institution across the UK, used their Open Educational Resources pilot project to identify and make available a huge range of resources, designed to complement, enhance and even replace certain practical exercises that are now too expensive or time-consuming for anyone but a final-year project student to undertake.
Curriculum delivery and support in Bioscience
The Subject Centre has provided a series of Audit Tools designed to initiate discussion and facilitate development on issues related to curriculum development. They are designed to help teachers consider the content and design of a course/programme with respect to a particular issue and where improvements could be made.
The Bioscience audit on Assessment [pdf] began the series' development, which has grown to cover such issues as:
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