Brief description

A module focused on curriculum design and embedding research into practice was taken by lecturers and other staff engaged in teaching at TU Dublin. It included an individual practitioner research project which we changed to a group project with a focus on exploring a new aspect of teaching, learning or assessment practice. Groups were then required to conduct a short literature review report and create a resource. The resource and report would inform other colleagues about the element of practice concerned and provide guidance with using these ideas or innovations in practice. The resources and reports are published on a fully open access basis in the Arrow repository in TU Dublin (https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ltcpgdprp/).

How does this align to the Curriculum Shaper(s)?

The innovation was introduced to a module that had been running for many years, new approaches were needed. Making space and time to plan and design the new project format into the module paid dividends and led to better outcomes for participants. The existing individual project was reinvented to give participants the experience of assessed group work and inform their own use of group work in their teaching. The resources and reports produced by the groups have provided a valuable additional toolkit to colleagues locally, nationally and internationally. The dissemination of reports and resources through the Arrow repository demonstrated the value of open access publishing and open educational resources as a further outcome of this module.

Future directions

The format, structure and assessment of a project of this kind could be transferred and adapted to other TU Dublin modules and indeed group projects were designed into a number of new modules during our programme redesign in 2019. In addition, there is renewed focus on how we can share outputs from various modules as open educational resources/examples of open scholarship online.

One piece of advice

Set clear and realistic goals for group projects, with an initial proposal phase to ensure groups do not design large-scale projects which will not be feasible in a short time. We also refined the required output, initially we called this a ‘learning design’ which was too vague for the participants. Specifying a ‘resource’ and giving examples (such as infographics, posters, webpages) helped groups to get to work quickly and in a focused way. Publishing project work was a strong motivator to groups and should be considered as a way of celebrating and disseminating what students can achieve. Students can be enabled to undertake independent research with light-touch supervision and produce valuable resources for others to use.