Supporting Responsive Curricula is a JISC-funded project supported by the Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design programme.  The project is led by Manchester Metropolitan University. 

Our Project

The project is piloting agile, demand-led curriculum design processes that promote flexible delivery and enhance learner employability. SRC will break new ground in curriculum interoperability, piloting the “tagging” of curriculum with competences valued by employers and professional bodies to support informed choice about study options and assist learners in choosing electives to support their career intentions and in showcasing their experience and abilities for a professional audience. The project will promote dialogue with key bodies in the North West’s growth sectors - legal, financial services, physiotherapy and creative digital - to ensure that meaningful “skill tags” are used. Through this pioneering work, SRC will provide novel use-cases for the development of the HR-XML standard by representing competence frameworks, tagging courses with intended competences and using the same competences to structure Curriculum Vitae (Resumé) information.

Work within the SRC project has combined with MMU's new Strategic Framework for Learning Teaching and Assessment and Threshold Standards for the Student Experience, in an institution-wide change programme to Enhance the Quality of Assessment for Learning (EQAL). MMU's EQAL initiative is introducing a new curriculum framework, new administrative systems and processess, revised quality assurance processes and new learning systems to transform the student experience. The entire undergraduate curriculum is being re-written and SRC principles are being embedded to ensure there is a definitive curriculum database in which all assessment is tagged with employability skills. The diagram below shows SRC's early prototype for enabling tutors to show how module (Unit) learning outcomes will be assessed and employability outcomes that will be developed through the assessment:

EQAL is now a firmly established programme and will go live this September for first-year undergraduates. The recent mid-programme review gives a good overview of where the project is up to and contains a useful timeline eqal-mid-programme-review-july-2011.pdf

To represent the learning process we have gone through in SRC and EQAL on curriculum design and approval, a game has been designed (Accreditation!) which we hope will provide a useful resource for other projects. It would provide a useful and stimulating training resource for those trying to encourage stakeholder engagement when embarking on a major change process involving program design and approval. The resources for the game can be found on the design studio at Accreditation!

You can also look at our experience with e-Portfolios with the current institutional strategy authored by Rod Cullen from the Centre for Learning and Teaching. See E-portfolio review

Our Dissemination

SRC project blog/website

EQAL project blog/website

Our Outputs

Engaging Employers and Professional Bodies in Curriculum Design

MMU - Professional Development Day

Case Study on developing stakeholder requirements for an academic database

Our Emerging Model for Evaluating Responsiveness

Course Planning Cards - to support team planning, decision-making and discussion about practical issues

Accreditation! - a game designed to engage teams in thinking about approaches to responsiveness in the approval process

A process map for the review process developed as part of the new QA procedures: http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/src/?p=341

SRC Interviews Initial Analysis.docx  Analysis of Interviews on Responsiveness with 20 Final year students

LAW STRAND CASE STUDY v3.doc  The impact of employability initiatives on our LAW deparrtment

SRC_Physiotherapy_casestudy.doc The SRC Physiotherapy strand

The work we have been undertaking in the Creative Digital Sector: http://www.srcproject.co.uk

Our Cluster

We are working in Cluster A with 3 other projects involved in the Curriculum Design programme. The common focus of these projects is around learner-centred curriculum design and employer/professional body engagement in the design process.  Some of the common issues for Cluster A include organisational and procedural barriers facing staff who want to develop a flexible and responsive curriculum including those that span internal structures. In consultation with other projects in the Curriculum Design programme, we have devised a rich picture that highlights the need for joined-up thinking across organizational boundaries between Student Records, Quality Assurance, Marketing and Course Teams. SRC and EQAL are working hard to overcome such barriers.

The other projects in our cluster are:

Leeds Metropolitan University - Personalised Curriculum Creation through Coaching (PC3) project

Staffordshire University - Enable project

University of Bolton - CoEducate project