"Challenging traditional program design and delivery to better support widening participation"
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Professor Helen Marshall, Vice-Chancellor of University of Salford, delivered a keynote focused on delivering a better support of widening participation in Universities. Current agendas that seek to promote “widening participation” and the development of skilled as well as knowledgeable graduates mean that universities need to take a step back to re-examine and challenge traditional curriculum design and delivery models. This paper explores the current landscape and requirements such as modularisation, credits, learning outcomes and levels and how those support and/or constrain curriculum design and delivery that engages and develops students who come from backgrounds that are mixed in terms of previous educational experience, socio-economic class and cultural heritage. The central theme is to challenge perceptions that certain approaches to curriculum design and delivery are not possible because of these requirements.
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"Challenging traditional program design and delivery to better support widening participation"
- 1. “Challenging traditional program design and delivery to better support widening participation”. Professor Helen Marshall Vice-Chancellor University of Salford
- 2. Our goal at Salford is to: “ Design programs and develop our staff to provide students with education experiences that allows all students to achieve to the best of their ability regardless of their background or prior educational attainment”
- 3. Challenges • Diverse range of students – one curriculum • Staff base with a different experience at University and some years experience in designing and delivering the curriculum in a certain way. • ‘Somebody else’s problem’ • Misconceptions regarding QAA requirements • Deficit model approach
- 4. Possible approaches to curriculum design that incorporates learning skills within the overall student offer. Three broad approaches exist: i. Separate ii. Semi-integrated iii. Integrated
- 5. Separate • The support is provided separately usually by non-faculty based staff • Participation is often voluntary and sits outside the specified curriculum • These arrangements can provide focused safe space for the students • The usage data can be tracked against course performance data • This approach tends to use a deficit model – assumes these students require special attention • Places extra, non-credit bearing work on students who may be already struggling with their workload • We find it is sometimes the ‘worried well’ who access these services • Some students may also feel stigmatised
- 6. Semi-integrated • Provision is credit-bearing/ recognised and part of the specified curriculum design • Skills are integrated with subject content at different levels of the program in some modules • All students undertake the same sessions • Working and learning practices and academic content are aligned • No additional workload • Scaled back additional separate and targeted support available to provide safe space
- 7. Fully integrated • This is a similar approach to the semi-integrated approach but there is a balance of skills and knowledge built into every module. The skills development builds by level.
- 8. Salford’s Journey so far… Our approach has been step by step moving from the separate to the semi-integrated approach as a baseline. Some examples of full integration are now occurring. Challenges are: • Staff development and preconceptions/ habitual practices • Professional body requirements – Myth ‘v’ Reality • QAA requirements - Myth ‘v’ Reality • Content ‘v’ Skills • Developing a fully Inclusive and targeted approach through joined up data and processes
- 9. Examples of what we have done… Separate learning skills support – Skills for Learning from the Library
- 10. Examples of what we have done Semi-integrated – Learning support for Nurses
- 11. Examples of what we have done… Integrated models
- 12. The challenges ahead… • Providing a targeted, multi-layered learning skills environment which focuses on full integration, and uses separation and semi-integration as an effective triage – one size does not fit all. • Changing hearts and mind/ overcoming prejudices/ habitual practices/ old fashioned conceptions of the ‘job’ of an academic – it’s a new world of fluidity, agility and responsiveness • Integrating digital fluency and blended delivery into all areas of learning skills service – there is an incfreasing expectation that all services are available in digital and blended forms • Ensuring we join up data from this work to help inform and influence our wider learning environment and encourage positive behaviours in students through learning analytics and intelligent service provision – the key is personalisation of experience
Editor's Notes
- What I am going to focus on today is how we might meet the challenges related to program design and delivery to address more effectively the broader range of students that enter HE in 2017. I want to stress that we at Salford are very much on a journey with this agenda but we are proud of our WP record but also conscious of our responsibilities to only admit students from these backgrounds but also to ensure they graduate.
- This is our goal. A couple of points need to be stressed: In the 1980’s participation was around 12%. Over 90% of these came from more traditional backgrounds and were likely to have close relatives and friends who had been to Uni and studied via an A-level route. Today, participation is around 50% with a far more diverse and richer section of society attending Uni with much more diverse prior educational experience.
- This slide looks at the challenges we have identified and focussed on at Salford. Questions from staff who are willing and want to engage with the student body but who often become frustrated with university curriculum frameworks and models that set a direction of travel which is still tuned in to students from more traditional backgrounds. Couple this with professional body views and requirements ad it’s a difficult landscape to navigate. Go through a couple of points to expand on each one of these
- Need to emphasise this is our experience. Different universities, different student populations will need to examine the range of approaches possible and choose the best way forward for them. These models examine practice in terms of how learner and learning development opportunities and support are designed by the University to sit in or alongside the curriculum.
- We have done some work to analyse the pros and cons of each of the possible ways of designing the curriculum so that all students reach a threshold of learning skills and behaviours that enables them to succeed. Students will be at different stages when they start at the University. However, it is fair to say they all require some level of adaptation to study at University. So how do we design something that allows everyone to potentially succeed and some to excel? The approach we have taken in the initial phase of looking at our curriculum is to look at the positives and negatives of different ways of doing this to build a model around the positives and reduce the negatives as far as possible. Separate we have found has far more negatives than positives.
- Semi-integrated approach Skills – we do it already with research methods for final year dissertation/project students.
- Fully-integrated approach Evidence suggests that students who benefit most are above average at entry in tariff terms.
- Skills for learning website run by the library – very popular with studnts seeking generic background support and quick tutorials on general learning FAQs, but it is not targeted. Generic in scope which is both useful, and a turn off for those requiring discipline-specific help.
- All nurses have to pass this basic arithmetic competency test. They can take it as many times as they like – it forms part of a module and so it built into a credit bearing structure. However, there is further learning skills support sitting outside core curriculum for those students struggling with this competency.
- School of Arts and Media – Journalism and Broadcast CSE School of Business In each of these instances, the focus for the student actually stops being on the acquistition of these skills as a separate point of focus. Instead they focus on the actual task at hand – namely the end benefit of the programme of study. the Learning skills gained are acknowledged through reflective engagement in real world learning, with these skills being achieved/ mastered as a result of their appropriate application to the real world, active and collaborative learning environment/ task at hand. In these instances, learning skills are fully embedded as a means to an end, instead of a separate, or semi integrated end in themselves; they become productively invisible, except in deliberate reflection.