This week’s session focused on curriculum design and how we incorporate and define learning outcomes. There is a wide range of resources available as part of the Course Designer toolkit (UAL T&LE, n.d). I wish I had come across these support documents sooner in my role as a course leader. I found the guidelines and reflective questions helpful to better understand the purpose of the different course design elements.  

I agree with Davies (2012) that learning outcomes can be too cryptic formulated in academic language and be detached from practice. Writing new unit briefs and formulating the learning outcomes has also been a daunting exercise for me. Trying to formulate unambiguous and meaningful learning outcomes while following academic writing conventions is a challenging task. 

The benefit of having support sessions to unpack the assessment criteria and co-create meaning with the students is a useful way to ensure that students are aware of the expectation of the assessment. Davies (2012) highlights the situation where students are working to ambiguous learning outcomes but are confident about what they need to do in their coursework as most interesting (Fig. 1).  

Figure 1: Learning Outcomes (LO) understanding (Davies, 2012) 

This is a reminder for me that we can’t rely on the learning outcomes to be self-explanatory. No matter how well-written or accurately formulated we believe them to be, it still depends on the student and how the individual student makes sense of them. It has made me reflect on the importance of support sessions and introducing different ways to understand the brief. ‘Make the grade’ workshops are something that I have actively expanded for the block 2 units on my course. These include: Padlet exercise for co-creating meaning and evidencing how the different learning outcomes are met as well as a workshop for students to review and grade past course work examples. The aim is to co-create meaning of the brief and LO for the individual students and build their confidence for the summative assessment.  

References 

Davies, A. (2012) Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem? Available at: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/networks/issue-18-july-2012/learning-outcomes-and-assessment-criteria-in-art-and-design.-whats-the-recurring-problem  

UAL T&LE (Teaching and Learning Exchange) (n.d) Designing Teaching. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/teaching-and-learning-exchange/resources/designing-teaching 

The session yesterday was insightful as a discussion of the issues that may arise when researching your own institution. The poll in the beginning clarified that most of us thought it was a good idea to do so. It became clear as we went through the different reflection questions, that the original question is too complex to give a simple yes or no answer to. 

We seemed to always drift towards discussing the condition and details of the scenarios in our conversations to be able to give a response. A thorough and critical reflection of the potential risks or challenges with the proposed research might just be one of the important takeaways from this session. Naturally, you would always have to consider this but perhaps the implications of your research can be more challenging when you do the research within your own institution. 

I am very excited to start this PG Cert course and have an opportunity to reflect and learn. I am the course leader of MA Fashion Design Management, which is part of the Fashion Business School at LCF. I have been teaching since 2015, where I started as a lecturer for BA Fashion Management at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. I went into teaching after 8 years of working as an accessories designer in the industry.

Feel free to connect with me on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanneryenielsen/