Stephen Powell, thoughts mostly about learning

Rather than fund a whole army of ‘Plagiarism Consultants’ and associated conferences why not re-engineer towards authentic forms of assessment - deal with the root of the problem rather than tinker with the flawed approach of the essay!
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Universities review plagiarism policies to catch Facebook cheats:

Universities are reviewing their plagiarism policies to clamp down on students [...]

Should e-learning policies be written to empower staff and students to abandon institutional provision?
Two weeks into the semester proper the 7 student researchers recruited for the first cohort are all engaging with the first module.
Forced to work outside of the UoB learning platforms (administrative issues), we have concentrated our communications around our Wordpress.com site and [...]

Chapter 2, Understanding the Curriculum in Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education (2005, Barnett and Coate) is a useful starting point for considering curriculum design in HE.
This is complex area, and the slide below summarises seven notions of what might influence the development of curricula. Arguably an eigth dimension could now be added in [...]

A bit of a déjà vu feeling with this one. It is a racing certainty that institutions like mine will have to increasingly meet the needs of students who are not the ‘traditional’ 18 year undergraduate. They will want to study increasing amounts of CPD (short courses), will study entirely online and won’t [...]

I started this Pattern Language project last February with Ian Tindal and Richard Millwood and have been making intermittent progress since then. It is based upon the Ultraversity project and aims to capture the key elements of the approach developed for a degree programme based on action research methodology supported entirely through online communities [...]