“WHy should I do This?” MAking the information systems curriculum relevant to strategic learners

Abstract

Abstract Learners who ‘strategically’ engage with information systems and computing curricula are becoming more prevalent in Higher Education institutions. Increasingly they demand more prescriptive advice from teaching staff to achieve particular grades and often fail to demonstrate the learning outcomes that the curriculum originally intended to deliver. The use of Biggs’ Constructive Alignment [1] to revise the curriculum has presented new opportunities to reflect upon the learning activities that need to be undertaken, and can result in a focus on teaching process rather than how to achieve a product. This paper presents a case study of how a business process modelling module has been developed over six years to progressively align the assessment tasks with learning activities and Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO). Early indications were that the explicit declaration of ILO made the learners appear more strategic. This shift provided new challenges for the teaching staff, particularly in terms of designing appropriate summative assessment, and presenting the ILO to learners in a meaningful and justifiable way. The use of form templates is described to assist the communication of ILO, as well as supporting the thinking necessary to build a constructively aligned curriculum. Such a curriculum places more emphasis upon the dynamics of learning interactions, and should explore what learners achieve outside of the timetabled curriculum. Finally, this work is evaluated in the context of qualitative responses to open questions asked at the end of each iteration of the module.