1. COURSE DESIGN INTENSIVES (CDIs): DOING CURRICULUM DESIGN DIFFERENTLY

2. CDI aims curriculum design in extended, multi-professional teams
design at programme level
speed up development times
cascade e-learning design expertise into academic departments
First something about our efforts to make an impact on e-learning curriculum design at Oxford Brookes.
I’ll try to let the pictures tell the story. What you can see is an example of what we call the course design intensives. You can see several course teams, together with their school learning technologist, e-learning specialist educational developers, and course administrators, working intensively over 2 or 3 days to design and build e-learning elements for their course.
You can see a list of our aims for these events.
These are aims to change business-as-usual curriculum design.

3. Timeline
2003-? e-Learning strategy development (Oxford Brookes University)
National JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning Synthesis and Support Project (
National HEA Pathfinder Course Design projects
Successive Oxford Brookes curriculum development initiatives
Coventry University and Robert Gordon University curriculum redesign, Oxford University
2012 -> Victoria University, Melbourne, Latrobe University, Melbourne
Notice that by 2009 CDIs were being used at Brookes and elsewhere to support curriculum renewal broadly, i.e. not specifically focused on elearning.
Although, in each case the role of technology is a part of the design process. Today it would be most unwise to design a course without carefully planning the role of technology in it.

4. CDI Process
Many variations, depending upon number of teams and their names and objectives.
What is invariant?
Extended teams, public designing, peer review and feedback and iterative redesign.

5. Sometimes bigger than Ben Hur …
The scale can be very different.
Top picture is on a mock course approval panel conducted during a CDI process for our School of Business in This involved around 70 academics meeting in roughly 7 large program areas to completely redesign all of the undergraduate programs.
Middle picture is of a CDI for e-learning at University of Brighton involving approximately 6 course teams in redesigning their programs to incorporate technology enhanced learning.
The middle picture is the single programme team working to design a brand-new masters of nursing fully online course.
… other times not so much

6. Designing… … building in tandem
CDIs attempt to get teams building at the same time as they design -- building, revising, building, revising, building etc.
Designing in iterative cycles through high level programme considerations, to module level to session and activity level.
Our annual review and periodic review and validation processes tend -- it’s not inevitable but it is a strong tendency -- to separate designing at each of these levels and to separate designing and building as processes.

7. Designing in ‘public’
Explicit designs, intended for display and testing ideas with others
In these pictures you can see explicit designs that are displayed in order to be interrogated, challenged, shared and iteratively amended to perfection.
I’ve tried over the years to use standard design templates and frameworks, but largely abandoned this in recent years. It seems to me that this often gets in the road, because it takes time for people to understand an unfamiliar framework. So now we give teams objectives to work to and let them use whatever design approach they prefer.

8. Peer review (critical friends)
Promoting iterative design & development using peer and student feedback (Sharpe et al 2006)
In this picture you can see a curriculum team presenting one of their activity designs to critical friends. This peer review process seems to be a way to harness creativity and to gather experience and exemplars so as to create better designs.
Another part of this process is having suitable places to work in teams.
Research shows that the most effective courses, those that continue to get good student feedback long after the Hawthorne effect has faded, are those that systematically collect and act on student and staff feedback about the running of the course. That means more than just regular happy sheets. That sort of systematic evaluation needs resourcing.
What the picture does not show is student involvement in the design process. That seems like a big gap to me.
Sharpe, R., Benfield, G., Roberts, G. and Francis, R. (2006). "The undergraduate experience of blended e-learning: a review of UK literature and practice undertaken for the Higher Education Academy." [Online] Retrieved 3 October, from

9. Benefits * Tangible outputs Collective ‘ownership’ of the course
More ‘coherent’ courses (arguably)
Building networks
Sharing good practice
Conceptual change
“There’s been a kind of switch in the way that lecturers look at things”
* (Dempster, Benfield & Francis 2012)
Outputs include everything from course approval documentation to new blended and distance learning courses up and running