uk academic modules

uk academic modules

Reimagining Academic Modules in the UK: Enhancing Learning and Innovation

1. Introduction to Academic Modules

Academic UK undergraduate programmes typically include modules as the standard way of organising teaching. Typically, a 3-year Bachelor’s degree has 360 credits, usually studied at 120 credits per year. These credits are usually broken up into modules of 20 or 30 credits. A typical 3-year degree will include 20 or so modules plus an individual project in the final year. These are offered by Departments to students in a menu-style, allowing a substantial amount of choice. Such modules have atomised learning activities: a module of 30 credits would be expected to have 12-15 contact hours per week, with assigned learning activities contributing to 450 hours over 30 weeks i.e. quite intense. Having so many taught modules, with very modular assessment, drives a great need for coordination across modules. Numerous gadgets have been invented to aid in that and improve the effectiveness of the learning. The purpose of this report is to provide some new perspectives on academic modules, some of the ways they are being utilised to change teaching practices, and a vision for developing these in the future.

2. Challenges in the Current Academic Module Structure

There are a number of issues with the current module structure that affect undergraduate students. First, they are required to take a high proportion of core and compulsory modules, with limited scope for academic study beyond the degree subject. This can lead to the development of a dehumanized graduate ripe only for employment. However, undergraduates with a diverse range of skills and experiences who may want to pursue a different career path from their degree discipline have fewer opportunities to develop their capability from the core – beyond optional professional skills or employability courses available. This is problematic at a time when lifelong learning is essential to adapt to the changing career landscape, as highlighted in the white paper “Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth” (Department for Education, 2021).

The form of mandatory assessment in the current academic modules framework is often focused on examination performance, yet there are many learning disabilities in the student population. Using other forms of assessment to evaluate learning and knowledge acquisition, which are more inclusive, may be beneficial. The large challenges facing higher education are connected with the limited opportunities for summative assessment that can be offered across a high volume of students per academic staff per module. The modules within the framework often focus on specific content, within longer length to teachable sequences. Therefore, many undergraduate students may never have the chance to engage meaningfully in a theophoric research experience, using a range of research-informed teaching approaches, and have precious little time to employ tangible research processes beyond the level.

3. Innovative Approaches to Academic Module Design

Understanding how modules might be adapted to incorporate different aspects of learning and innovation led to the first set of module designs that, when monitored across the lifecycle of student learning, research activity and innovation, can be continually enhanced. Throughout the UK, universities group their taught study into discrete credit-measured modules. Generally, modules are allocated a single code to ‘define’ their content and role in curriculum planning; and, within prescription, students’ chosen modules create their individual ability to develop the content thread a university or higher education authority will ‘support’. For most modules the process works well, but designing modules in which intra- and interdisciplinary learning and innovation are integral throughout the student learning lifecycle that lasts for a specified (e.g. four-year) final degree classification program and producing an entirely new set of modules is challenging.

Key decisions for module designers therefore are to consider the roles and tasks end students are expected to fulfill (including additional decisions that may arise during their learning, knowledge validation, research activity, and innovation) and the module title, academic content, support processes, and assessment. With these decisions made, the module creates the means of inviting external contribution and enabling the student and the student entry and exit choices, he makes according to personal, interdisciplinary, and career goals. The options provided by intelligent modularization of prescribed programs will vary by end student skills, and by the innovative goals of the core staff assigned to the module, and will run from stand-alone independent research and industry or public bodies’ sponsored projects through end student and external participants’ integration into research groups which have specific innovation yielded output (e.g. data, tests, products, reports, patents, and business plans).

4. Impact of Academic Modules on Student Learning and Success

This paper focuses on a specific higher education teaching and learning element that is associated with academia: the classroom. In particular, it focuses on how the structure of modules is crucial in providing opportunities for students to develop the key twenty-first century skills that are discussed in the literature, as part of their programme or more generally (as ‘extras’). While the content of modules informs what students learn, the nature of the assessment and the extent of relevance of a variety of forms of assessment means that students will only internalize what and how they learn based on the doors that are open to them. This study aims to ascertain to what extent there are common areas within UK modules that are appropriate for the growing importance of the twenty-first century agenda in higher education and therefore contribute to this ongoing debate.

As anyone who has taught at this level will attest, students can vary significantly, even in classrooms of successful academic programmes. As teaching and learning is moving to the forefront of many higher education institutions with respect to activity, there is also a strong economic incentive to ensure that students are prepared to join a workforce that has changed tremendously in two decades. Furthermore, and irrespective of systemic government funding levels to support universities and/or the perceived ‘degree premium’, there are a range of more intangible benefits of having a university education, such as well-developed and considered skills and perspectives.

5. Recommendations for Future Academic Module Development

The findings from stage-one field studies show that academics and students have common expectations with regard to future learning, institutional support, and innovation. They are both looking towards the future, hoping for more experiential learning opportunities which are underpinned by practical experience and yet supported by the discipline-specific theoretical evidence-based knowledge from academic research. To turn the recommendations of technology, innovation, and experiential learning back on themselves, we need to develop pedagogical and course innovations that can sustain these student expectations. A major consequence of the new engineering and technology content within the academia-business relationship that is emerging, relating to innovation, job-ready agendas and curricula implementations, is that innovation is increasingly becoming more and more designed into products and processes, and ever closer to their original business objectives.

The aim and objectives of academia are that responding to employer needs and graduate employment is above and beyond rigor in educational adjustment. Educational achievements are all very well, but in the emerging dialogue between academia and business, keener voices are calling for pace and direction – not just in relationships and experiences – but also in itself. It is unlikely that curriculum-related developments will have taken place in academic institutions without a planned basis behind them, and yet planning in business – at strategic and operational levels – and educational planning are unlikely to be straightforward partners. The danger is that academics too heavily rely upon the minutiae of resources to enable curricula development. The business/academic collaboration can then be used to foster particular aims of the business, rather than to support student learning. Career implications, notwithstanding that the academy could become a repository of education and training that could quickly become irrelevant – even obsolete in the academic sense. The underlying strategic purposes of supporting learner autonomy and creativity are the object of the collaboration.