Home
--- Introduction
--- Content Summary
--- Acknowledgements

Context
--- Teaching Philosophy
--- Institutional Context

Course Structure
--- Aims, Objectives, Content
--- Delivery Methods
--- Assessment

Reflection
--- Commenting on Content
--- Use of Voting Handsets
--- Laboratory Examination
--- Written Examination
--- Continuous Assessment
--- Overcoming Blocks

Outcomes
--- New course rationale
--- Personal learning

This section is an attempt to note down some of the thoughts I've had about the process along the way, and particularly as I've drawn the pieces together at the end.

Preparing a web document

I've not tried to put a set of pages together like this before. Whilst I'm reasonably pleased with the result, it took quite a while to get there. In essence, it is just a traditional flat document split into pages with a contents list down the side. I was hoping to create something much more amenable to browsing, but I fear I have instead a huge body of text.

I had numerous artefacts collected from the year, such as photocopies of students' work, or e-mails, and others that I would like to have to give a better sense of context - such as photographs of the students' environment - but I timed out on including these.

In particular, I would have liked more artefacts in with the text with my commentary next to them.

Time commitment

I was unaware of how much time the project would take up. I was obviously ready for the 10 days of visits to London, but I didn't timetable in the additional 10 days or so that the project also required for portfolio building.

I will be building a portfolio for next year's new version of this course . But it will inevitably be a more organic creation, built as the artefacts come in. I am hoping to make the development of the portfolio the essential reflection tool I will need as the new course pans out.

Portfolio style

As I say above, I think this comes over as rather a dry piece - but I guess I always imagined it as more of a reporting document on the last run of the existing course.

Every run a research project

This idea was articulated beautifully by Jim, I think, in one of the meetings. I try out so many different ideas in my teaching each year, but I am a little daunted by the rigour required to measure their effect. Of course, this is a kind of action research, and we do the best we can do - but it is clear that there is so much to look at just in the one course. It's hard not to tweak 100 variables in this new course design, but I've managed to get it down to only about 37...

Working with other committed teaching academics

This has been the best part of the project - the conversations and thoughts provoked by our meetings. When I say best, I think I mean that it has been the catalyst. Each meeting and all the associated conversations have generated many many ideas that have found their way into my thinking - timed perfectly just as I develop a new course. If I had simply set aside 10 days (the 10 of the meetings) to think about/work on the course, I doubt the result would have been so effective.