Featured case study: e-Learning Course Design Intensives

The e-learning Course Design Intensives (CDI) workshop format was developed at Oxford Brookes University in 2003. The University of Brighton's Centre for Learning & Teaching (CLT) asked OCSLD to deliver CDIs at Brighton as part of its Higher Education Academy-funded Pathfinder project. Bringing the CLT together with Brighton's Learning Technologies Group (LTG), the aim was to provide fresh impetus to e-learning course design at Brighton and to develop the internal capacity to adapt and adopt the format at Brighton.

"a fantastic opportunity to have 3 days! (unheard of) to work with like-minded colleagues"

"time to think, plan and explore in greater depth. The workshop had a thorough, coherent structure which worked at the necessary level"

The CDIs are for course teams who have already made the commitment to e-learning, whether 'blended' or fully online. They aim to develop the practice of course design and development in expanded, multi-disciplinary teams, by linking academics with educational developers, learning technologists, and subject librarians. The basic idea is to bring additional development resources into the picture for development teams in a concentrated way, to get a quick result. These events have two key strengths: they provide access to additional expertise in e-learning and use the 'many hands make light work' principle.

OCSLD ran three 3-day versions of the CDIs which involved around 15 programme teams. We freely shared all our workshop materials, making them publicly accessible via our institutional wiki. Evaluations were highly complimentary - see red boxes.

Another measure of the success of the collaboration between OCSLD and Brighton is that Brighton’s CLT and LTG jointly facilitated the final event with OCSLD consultants and had successfully run a customised CDI of their own.

"the atmosphere: comfortable & vibrant - a good place to learn & with the right support available to facilitate real progress."