https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut Refection of Key aspects and documents en-us 2016-08-21 15:13:41 UTC 2026-01-22 01:45:51 UTC hello@padlet.com sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119048824 2016-08-21 15:28:39 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119048824 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119051807 I found the diagram Figure 1.1 (Graves as cited in Sklavou 2012) in this article particularly interesting.  It shows the recursive nature of course design and covers the main stages.  I have some issues with this.  The first one is that very rarely in my experience do teachers design courses from scratch.  When I worked at Bilkent University in Turkey a new in-sessional course was developed to support International Relations and Political Science and this involved working with the individual lecturers.  I found this practical experience invaluable, especially when I had responsibility for one course.  Most of the time, as in the example of PS14, it is about redesigning and making changes to existing courses and so may ignore  some key areas.  Also, time is a key area.  This diagram implicitly envisages a certain amount of time is available to complete the process.  In my own experience course design is sometimes a last minute affair completed in haste.  For example, I was drafted into the PS 14 course with about 1 week’s notice and about 1 week’s worth of material for a 4-week course.  I think that it is not uncommon for decisions on courses to be taken quite late.  When I was studying at Manchester University I can still remember my tutor saying, in a private conversation, that they would only begin planning for a course when they had received the payment.  Another important feature missing from the diagram are the teachers the deliverers of the course.  This diagram implies that the course develop is organising everything for the teachers to follow.  Reality is very different from this.  Teachers may have very strong beliefs about teaching and learning which may affect the delivery of the course markedly.  Therefore, the course develop must allow a certain amount of freedom to teachers and design activities which may be exploited in different ways.  Also, the relationship between teachers and the institution is important.  Sometimes for teachers on part-time contracts it may more beneficial to keep quiet and keep valuable feedback to themselves in order to maintain their hours.  That’s why I think the course developer needs to be involved in the teaching and be able to build up meaningful relations with the people delivering the course. For these reasons assessment has become the main organising principle and the assessment plan may be used to keep teachers on track.  So, not all of the elements of this process are equal.

]]> 2016-08-21 16:28:49 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119051807 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052517 2016-08-21 16:53:00 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052517 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052535 I suppose it is strange but I never thought of exams and the assessment as playing such a central part of unifying a course. I had been looking at materials, themes, genres, tasks and activities as forming the uniformity needed to maintain course cohesion. Yet, now I can see that, especially with large courses ( In the recent Pre-sessional course at Bristol University there are almost 1,000 students and 60 teachers), they are the lynch pins holding things in place. This article gives a clear explanation of this theory, making the case for its popularity]]> 2016-08-21 16:53:41 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052535 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052756 2016-08-21 17:02:36 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052756 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052768 I think that this is the way forward. I enjoy bouncing ideas about with others. However, it seems that course design where I work is mainly a solitary occupation, which can lead to problems. Obviously, you should try and get feedback, but the deadlines are usually tight. This article gives good positive reasons for it.]]> 2016-08-21 17:03:07 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119052768 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119053044 2016-08-21 17:12:41 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119053044 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119053915 Because so many of my students are Chinese,  I like to read articles  concerning their EAP experience.
What I like about this article is their focus on the "constructive socialisation process".  I think this is key, Chinese students particularly can take a long time to internalise aspects of EAP.  Thus, a course needs  to be recursive to help with these and also to develop the necessary skills to adapt to the collaborative work requirements.

]]> 2016-08-21 17:41:37 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119053915 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119053994 2016-08-21 17:45:28 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119053994 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119056117 I have chosen this piece of material from the current Pres-sessional course in Bristol to examine how change, an important part of course design, can be managed. The MLR has been devised as one element of the assessment (20%)for this course. It is slightly different from the previous year and aims to be relatively unique. The uniqueness hopes to prevent online plagiarism. After studying the previous year's task, a long 2500 word discursive essay using academic sources, it became apparent that students were only reading the abstract from the sources in their work. Because of this the course designer decided to reduce the scope and length. In the current MLR students are aiming to write 1500 using only 3 sources. These sources need to be linked over time, through bibliography and citation and theme. The final task is for students to decide what has changed in the body of knowledge over the period, using the 3 articles as evidence in the essay. Students and teachers had problems with this. The students were looking for examples on the web, but of course the literature reviews they encountered were very different, therefore they were more comfortable in comparing and contrasting the 3 articles. The teachers, more than 60, on the pre-sessional are a whole range of age and experience in EAP, so there was range of  differing information on the task itself and key aspects.  Many of these occur because of teacher beliefs or misunderstandings .  There is a clear marking criteria, which should have held things together.  However, last minute material like the one above had to be produced to try and  bring some uniformity before submission.
This shows that, especially for high stakes courses such as pre-sessional, changes in assessment, even if they are carefully explained in inductions and supported with relevant tasks, still need to be carefully monitored with meetings between staff and students ( which is what happened in the case of Bristol) so that any misconceptions about the assessments tasks can be addressed. These are currently being marked so it will be interesting to see if a high level of uniformity was reached.]]> 2016-08-21 19:09:01 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119056117 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119057808 2016-08-21 19:51:37 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119057808 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119057828 This is why course design is so time-consuming. It is vital to have clear and informative teacher's notes for each piece of material. This allows the course designer to get across the rationale and ways to exploit material.These are very important for in-house material and are needed if published material is not being used, but take hours to do. Collaboratively, they can be extended and developed with teacher input. For students, material which highlights the lesson objectives also helps them acquire some of the meta language needed to explain their needs. The material should help students to reflect on the lesson.]]> 2016-08-21 19:52:05 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119057828 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058024 2016-08-21 20:00:32 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058024 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058052 I was drawn to this as it is from 2016 and from Nottingham University concerning a pre-sessional course. So it seemed to tick most of the boxes. Reading this it made me think about the PS14 course. This is because PS14 does not have any assessment requirement. There is a baseline and a summative test, but they do not prevent them from advancing to the PS10 course. Without the pressure of a test the students were able to concentrate on their writing skills, acclimatise to life in Bristol and some visited other areas in the UK. It will be interesting to see how they fare in pre-sessional exams. Initially, it seems that the PS14 course gave the students added confidence. This was shown by the high numbers of them volunteering to be the class representative. Perhaps, there might be room for more of these non-assessed courses.]]> 2016-08-21 20:01:25 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058052 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058667 2016-08-21 20:19:37 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058667 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058691 Because of the emphasis placed on IELTS in university entry requirements, I was interested to read this. The main argument is that there is no real correlation between the IELTS grade and the success at post-graduate level. Obviously there is a need for an EAP equivalent test to do a better job]]> 2016-08-21 20:20:39 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058691 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058948 2016-08-21 20:29:39 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058948 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058966 I was so pleased to come up with this plan of work in collaboration with others. I feel that course design needs some innovation and creativity. I would not go so far to say that it is more of an art than a science, but I feel I was able to understand from the feedback that the students wanted more feedback on their written work. This delivers it and shares the work out equally between the teachers as I did not want one teacher to be the writing teacher and the other the grammar teacher. The longer lessons should allow greater depth to be achieved with greater freedom given to the teachers. I also, tried to think about the practicalities of submission for the students work. A great deal of time and effort went into choosing the names for thins so that they would transmit the right meaning. For example, "Action on teacher feedback" was used to emphasise that something needed to be done. Hopefully, this will help to produce a coherent productive course.]]> 2016-08-21 20:30:20 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119058966 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119059535 2016-08-21 20:49:27 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119059535 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119059553 This article is close to my heart. Course design needs to be flexible enough, especially in the coursework/portfolio, for students to be encouraged using assessment to do the things that we as teachers want them to do. This study exemplifies the importance of opportunity, instead of things being compulsory, and recursive feedback. Both of these things are needed for academic success in my opinion.]]> 2016-08-21 20:49:57 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119059553 sgillway https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119059767 2016-08-21 20:55:48 UTC https://padlet.com/sgillway/6zcc22fr8dut/wish/119059767