Viewpoints is a JISC-funded project supported by the Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design programme.  The project is led by the University of Ulster.

Our Project

The Viewpoints project will provide practitioners with a series of simple, user-friendly reflective tools that promote a creative and effective approach to the curriculum design process.  The project tools will consider themes such as assessment and feedback, information skills, creativity in the curriculum and learner engagement, and will relate these to key points in the learning life cycle.  The project outputs will bring together principles and examples of best practice to inform and inspire the practitioner and help them to plan and share curriculum designs and strategies.

Our Dissemination

Project blog/website

Viewpoints Project NING community (by invite)

Information Skills NING community (by invite)

Slideshare (copies of presentations, documents, printable files)

YouTube channel - Viewpoints YouTube videos/digital stories with closed captions for accessibility

Twitter - links about current Viewpoints activity

Delicious - social bookmarking site which allows us to share links, useful articles and research

JISC online conference 2011:

What needs to change in curriculum design?

Identifying and changing key curriculum design practices

Our Outputs

Viewpoints Assessment and Feedback Tool

Viewpoints Information Skills tool   

Staff development materials 

Printable workshop resources

Assessment and Feedback printable cards (module level) 

Information Skills printable cards (module level) 

Learner Engagement printable cards (module level)

The fourth theme, Creativity in the Curriculum, is still work in progress, and once the content is finalised we will add a set of Creativity in the Curriculum printable cards.

Viewpoints printable course level cards (Assessment and Feedback, Information Skills, Learner Engagement)

Viewpoints module view timeline worksheet

(this is a representation of the actual worksheet, scaled down to A4 size - the actual worksheet used in workshops is A0 size.)

• Course teams describe their objective for module design/redesign at the top of the worksheet.
• They then choose cards from their chosen theme that are relevant to their objective.
• They place the cards  (front side up) on the worksheet at the relevant points of the timeline. Cards can be used more than once in the timeline.
• They then turn the cards over and select relevant examples. 
• They tailor the plan to their own practice by writing comments below the cards.
• Fiinally, they add their own conclusions and action points to take forward.

Viewpoints course view timeline worksheet

(this is a representation of the actual worksheet, scaled down to A4 size - the actual worksheet used in workshops is A0 size.)

• Course teams describe their objective for course design/redesign at the top of the worksheet.
• They then choose cards from any of the themes that are relevant to their objective.
• They place the cards (front side up) on the worksheet at the relevant points of the timeline. Cards can be used more than once in the timeline.
• They then turn the cards over and select relevant principles. 
• They tailor the plan to their own practice by writing comments below the cards.
• Fiinally, they add their own conclusions and action points to take forward.

Viewpoints Handbook

We are currently working on our Viewpoints Handbook which will give teaching staff all the information they need to run a curriculum design workshop with their team, using our reflective resources - a learner timeline worksheet and best-practice pedagogical principles based around the four themes above.  It will come with a Download Pack (which we will add to the Download Studio once prepared) which contains a range of useful curriculum design resources for course teams - presentation templates, links and resources for each theme, printables, instructions for workshops and more.

The Executive Summary of the (draft) Viewpoints Handbook is currently available on our project website.. After our Steering Group meeting in May 2011, we will add the full Viewpoints Handbook, and we would actively welcome comments and feedback from other curriculum design course teams.

Other project outputs tagged with 'Viewpoints'

More information on Viewpoints

viewpointsfactsheet_new.pdf

A1Poster.pdf

A1Poster-02.pdf

A1Poster-03.pdf

A1Poster-04.pdf

Our Cluster

We are working in a cluster with 2 other projects involved in the Curriculum Design programme. The focus of the cluster is around learning design approaches and methodologies in curriculum design.  The cluster is working collectively on developing ideas for different types of representation that might be used to describe design at the curriculum level including a ‘production to presentation’ timeline, workload and costing matrices and process flow maps.

The Open University - Open University Learning Design Initiative (JISC-OULDI) project

University of Stathclyde - Principles in Patterns (PiP) project