Creating University Programmes Designed for the Diverse Strengths of Individual Students & Graduates
How can Universities offer educational engagements that bring together the diverse learning strengths of individuals through course design and enable the student to thrive in a creative and collaborative environment that transforms them into a uniquely skilled graduate?
While there are some notable examples of innovation, University courses still teach and assess the same knowledge and skills to groups of students regardless of their diverse leaning strengths or future aspirations.
And although institutions provide students with the tools to evidence the value of their learning to employers through graduate matrices, these are often generic, and give limited insight into a graduate’s unique capabilities.
Gardner, Christensen, Heathcote, Robinson
The intersection between key thinkers on learning practice and curriculum development could provide some useful insights in addressing this challenge:
Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple Intelligences, Clayton Christensen’s thinking on innovative curriculum design, Dorothy Heathcote’s notion of students taking the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ role within a community of practice and Ken Robinson’s focus on creativity in education represent a convergence of thinking for new forms of course design to develop the strengths of individual students alongside effective peer engagement.
These philosophies, combined imaginatively, can stimulate effective curriculum design to enable students to become learning innovators and innovative graduates.
By recognising the existence of multiple intelligences within new forms of curriculum and assessment design, Universities can enable students to develop their own educational experience working alongside their peers.
This approach should adopt the principle of the student taking on the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ for themselves, appropriate to their respective intelligences and learning strengths, within a framework that positions students and academics within collaborative teams on a shared learning journey.
Too much University course design and delivery is generic for students and assessment is invariably the same for every individual on a course.
For this reason, concerns about the extent to which students use AI to provide them with the answers to assessments should focus not on cheating, but on why so much assessment methodology creates this risk in the first place?
We need to design ‘real-world’ degree programmes where teams of students are given the opportunity to create new learning environments for themselves within cross-subject collaborative teams, guided by academics from multiple disciplines in a flexible educational framework.
Students could be pre-assessed using an evaluation process before beginning the programme. This would identify their strengths as individuals, unique skillsets and aspirations for development – something far removed from the crude yardstick of school exam results.
The students would become a team member for an opening course project with peers from a range of academic disciplines and educational backgrounds, creating a dynamic, collaborative group of learners with complementary skillsets.
The students could start their journey by interrogating what the ideal learning experience should look like for them, and sketch a vision of themselves as a graduate of the future.
This project would represent the starting point for the University experience, drawing on the diverse backgrounds of each student in a real-time project addressing meaningful challenges.
This experience would form the platform for the subsequent educational experience. Subject studies could then be interwoven with this contextualised project-based framework.
To create an innovative educational approach which takes account of the student’s own strengths and aspirations requires Universities to:
1. Assess the strengths and appropriate learning styles of the students to create a personalised curriculum and tailored assessment methodologies
2. Design a curriculum that is student-centred with a cross-disciplinary peer group approach with academics as supporting and guiding collaborators
3. Implement programme delivery models that bring together students and staff across schools and faculties through hybrid approaches to learning
Studies show that current and future developments in AI can help to revolutionise the personal learning experience of students.
We should also ask how we such tools can help to design new courses and assessments that liberate the student to realise their strengths as a learner?
This is certainly a positive opportunity, albeit with ethical and privacy implications. However, we are not yet taking full advantage of the opportunities that AI offers for a new form of educational experience.
Universities should seek an integrated approach to creative course design and assessment where the individual intelligences and the skills of the students are able to thrive.
Such projects should feature at the start of the University experience, not at the end
The opportunity to deliver this approach at scale has not existed before now.
The AI technologies that are evolving rapidly enable us to consider a future curriculum which is genuinely student-centred at a far deeper level.
Universities need to plan now to implement this for the future.
