Following a successful bid to our Collaborative Development Fund – an Advance HE Member Benefit – Dr Claire Stocks (Head of Academic Practice) explains the inspiration for the bid from the University of Chester’s Centre for Academic Innovation and Development, and shares the outputs that the funding will support.
During 2024-25, The Centre for Academic Innovation and Development (CAID) at the University of Chester has been supporting an institution-wide re-imagining of the curriculum to enhance student experience, retention, attainment, recruitment and employability.
Our successful Collaborative Development Fund bid is supporting our team to work with colleagues from the University of Hull, the University of South Wales and Southern Cross University in Australia. Together, we are developing recommendations and resources from the Chester experience to support successful institution-wide change in other Advance HE member institutions in the UK and beyond.
Contemporary challenges in the HE sector are providing impetus for many universities, including Chester, to adapt their approaches to curriculum design and delivery. For example, a 2024 Universities UK publication, Opportunities, growth and partnership: a blueprint for change from the UK’s universities identifies a range of challenges including financial sustainability, responding to evolving employment and skills needs, supporting local growth needs and reducing inequalities in access to education. In response, many UK universities are seeking effective ways to implement significant changes to maximise efficiencies, facilitate pedagogic innovation, and ensure that institutions are meeting the core ‘B3’ metrics required by the Office for Students. These challenges are not confined to the UK, with similar trials confronting institutions across the globe (see, for example, Scott and Guan, 2023 and Crawford, et. al, 2024).
Chester’s approach
At Chester, we embarked on an ambitious project to embed five key learning, teaching and assessment principles in curricula across the university. As a result of the changes, teaching will be competence-based; offer social learning opportunities; be inclusive; use embedded, continuous authentic assessment; and be structured around shorter modules (maximum 10 weeks), enabling students to concentrate their efforts and attention more effectively. To achieve such wholesale change in a short period of time (the new curriculum will be delivered from September 2025), we have used a design sprint approach which featured collaboratively designed resources and drew on the facilitation skills and expertise of senior academics, academic developers and a range of professional support services staff. In the space of eight months, over 110 course teams have been supported to re-imagine their curricula in alignment with our five key principles.
Design sprints have traditionally been used in technological development contexts (like Google, where the approach originated as a way to solve complex challenges and to design new products), but they are gaining popularity in Higher Education as a means of supporting wide-ranging change at pace (see, for example, work done by De Montfort University, here, Nottingham Trent University, here, and Oxford Brookes University, here). We adopted the approach based on its potential to foster focused collaboration and achieve significant change within limited timeframes. However, we also recognised that the scale of change that was envisaged required the development of a number of specific resources and assets to help course teams to understand and apply the principles that they were being asked to design into their courses.
Our CDF project outputs
Following the implementation of our sprint process, the aim of our CDF bid is to identify a suite of practical materials to include in a strategic toolkit for organisational change, and this will be our key output from the project. The Chester CDF team (Dr. Claire Stocks, Laura Milne, Dr. Katharine Welsh, Prof. Ruth Healey and Prof. Jackie Potter) are using a process evaluation approach to focus our attention on the effectiveness of our sprint methodology and supporting resources, and to identify aspects of the process and particular resources that have been impactful in supporting the re-design process in our context or where enhancements could be made. The expertise of our collaborative partners is helping us to ensure that our evaluation is robust, and that our learning at Chester is fully transferable to a range of institutional contexts. Data is being gathered through a combination of synchronous paired discussions between sprint day facilitators, and asynchronous interviews with course team participants. These collection methods are intended to generate rich data from as many of the people involved in the sprints as possible, and to give us insight into the effectiveness of the process and resources from a range of perspectives. Our data will then be used alongside advice from our collaborative partners to develop our process and resources for sharing with the wider Advance HE member network.
The support that we have received from Advance HE through the CDF initiative is providing us with an opportunity to fully capitalise on the learning that we have gained (and continue to gain) from our institution-wide curriculum (re)development work. We are excited to work with our collaborative partners to generate materials that might provide some ‘off the shelf’ guidance that others can adapt and build on as they address the sector-wide challenges that we have faced. As a result, we hope to extend the collaborative spirit of the CDF beyond the team involved in this project, and provide at least a starting point for others who are engaged in similar development work.
Dr Claire Stocks (SFHEA) is Head of Academic Practice in the Centre for Academic Innovation and Development at the University of Chester.
References:
Crawford, J., Allen, KA., Cowling, M. (2024). Australian Higher Education in Perpetual Crisis? A Narrative of Crisis Leadership in Universities. In: Rudolph, J., Crawford, J., Sam, CY., Tan, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Crisis Leadership in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54509-2_11
Scott, T., & Guan, W. (2023). Challenges facing Thai higher education institutions financial stability and perceived institutional education quality. Power and Education, 15(3), 326-340. https://doi.org/10.1177/17577438221140014
UUK (2024) Opportunity, growth and partnership: a blueprint for change from the UK’s universities. Retrieved from https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2024-10/opportunity-growth-and-partnership-a-blueprint-for-change.pdf
