Programme Review

So you’ve decided to embark upon a review of your teaching programmes…

We’ve started looking at what we do in some of our programmes. For now we’re starting the process in-house, which means the Scholarship group within the School get to set the direction, speed and path that we take^[1]. I thought it would be helpful to lay down some ideas and principles for this process. There are a few things I’d like this review to be, in no particular order:

• open - we’ll be sharing outputs from workshops (and the inputs for workshop) widely within the School and inviting contributions at all stages from all key ‘stakeholders’^[2]. I’m also going to be posting here whenever key outputs are created, so they might get sanity checked and have pressure applied by public scrutiny, which I think will help keep us on the right track.
• inclusive - this isn’t just going to be a cabal of five or six individuals deciding how we should do things. All staff who want to be involved will be able to be involved. Students both past and present will be included in the design process, as will other key parties such as our external examiners, our industry partners and our external advisory board.
• comprehensive - this isn’t tinkering around the edges. Let’s really test ourselves here - prod and poke at all the things we do and question why we do them. We’re only going to get to do this once for a good few years, so lets not squander the opportunity by shying away from the difficult questions.
• limitless - at least initially, let’s not worry so much about practicalities, those can come later. To begin with lets think about how and what we’d teach in an ideal world unconstrained by academic regulations, workload, and academic systems and processes. We can compromise the dream later.
• iterative - if we need to go back to an earlier stage based on things we’ve worked out in a later stage, we will. Each stage may need many repetitions to capture contributions from all the involved parties, and that’s fine. We’ll go round as many times as we need to get it right…

Why do these things matter? It’s all based on my past experiences of programme development. We’ve done some of the above in most of our previous developments, and when we have they’ve been a positive part of the process - but we’ve never done all of them at the same time. I’ve also seen quite a few programme developments that have not been up to scratch, and they’ve usually done the exact opposite of these things. So these then are the principles I think that will lead us to a successful conclusion, whether we decide that a full redevelopment is needed, or whether we decide that there’s nothing that actually needs to change.

The first task for us is to determine how much change is needed in our undergraduate programmes, if any at all. The model for this is fairly simple: decide what the ideal Computer Science and Software Engineering degree programmes would look like in 2025, then examine how our degree programmes currently are, and if the two are not the same, some change is needed. So that’s what we’re going to do next…

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1. I’m aware that there’s an education development service coming down the track at Cardiff. I got to see a snippet of it, and thankfully it matched my expectations in many ways. However I have no idea how far along the track we are, so we’re forging ahead a bit and we’ll let them catch up to us later as I’m sure they will. At least for now with high-level programme design I’m confident in our abilities, because not to blow our own trumpets but we are really quite good at this. ↩︎

2. god this management speak is depressing, but I’m struggling for a better and less nauseau inducing phrase. ↩︎