Speaker 1: I want to just have a conversation about language and take a slightly different approach to the same thing. So you're going to keep coming back to those statements. Those are the official statements from the QAA. But that isn't generally how most people engage with the issue of constructive alignment. Who's familiar with constructive alignment already? Anyone come across it? Do you have any way, shape, or form? This? Okay. Actually, it's very much – it's not that it's universally accepted, but it is very much the currency in higher education. It was work done way back in the late nineties. There's something called a solo taxonomy, which we'll come back to it in just a moment. But essentially, constructive alignment is a fairly simple idea, which is that you describe the learning that the student is going to do in terms of the outcomes. you, as the QAA said in their documentation, you say you will at the end of this course of study be able to do x, y, z. Constructive alignment is that when you come to assess that, you assess the outcomes. You assess the ability of the student at the end of the program to do x. You don't assess the content. The content in some senses, in terms of course design, is fairly irrelevant. You actually have outcomes that you've specified. You have assessment, which actually is testing the ability of the student to evidence at various levels those outcomes. And as a consequence, all of your teaching and learning activities, in theory, allow the student to articulate those learning outcomes and therefore provide the evidence at the end. So a simple crude example would be if you actually had an intended learning outcome that asked the student to be able to evaluate multilingual sources. They might be doing programming policy studies with French and Italian. You would say multilingual sources, you have to be able to evaluate the credibility or validity of those sources. You'd be assessing their ability to do that at the end somehow. And you would also expect them, during the course of their study, to be doing some of that, to be doing some evaluating, to be looking for those sources, to be understanding what's meant by validity, understand what's meant by reliability, going through processes. So in a sense, the reason we focus on verbs, those words, is that the intention is that the verbs that you use to specify your intended learning outcomes should be assessed. You should be assessing the ability of the student to do that. And all of the teaching and learning activities will also feed into that process, provides them with opportunities. Essentially, this is what I want them to be able to do. That's what I'm going to assess them on. So I'm assessing them as being able to do that. And so when I'm teaching them, I'm going to give them lots of opportunity to practice doing that. So an interesting example that I keep citing to people, and I have to confess, it's very nerve-wracking being filmed, because I have to confess, I don't know where this comes from. But I don't think it is apocryphal. It was one of those things, you pick up the conference and then forget who told you. Is the notion of something like a program in late 20th century French sociology, which has specified outcomes that talks about being able to understand the different national relationships, or different trends, and so on. And one program was actually being taught in the middle of the day on campus by a particular tutor, who specialized in Bollyards, his kind of illustration of those key learning points. Someone else taught the program as an evening class, but they were a Jean-Paul Sartre fanatic, so they actually used Jean-Paul Sartre to illustrate a lot of their points. And someone else was teaching on the weekend program, and they used Bourdieu, because that happened to be the late 20th century French sociologist that they liked. And so they taught the same course, but actually used quite different content to illustrate a lot of what was being asked of the students. It didn't stop the students being assessed against the learning outcomes, because the learning outcomes didn't say, you have to know everything there is about Bourdieu. The learning outcomes would say, you need to understand trends in the French cultural society and the influence of the media. That would be the learning outcome. So the content isn't what you assess. It's quite hard when you work with a lot of academics, because they're specialists in content. Content is what they've become very knowledgeable in or about. It's quite difficult to get them to just put the content to one side for a moment while they design the learning. And we all do it. I mean, I sit down, and my areas are mostly around digital literacy and education, and so on. So when I've been given the responsibility of designing a course, I've designed several and taught several, it is quite tempting to sit down and say, great, what am I going to teach them about? And then you go back to your program specification template and have to start writing learning outcomes and assessments and stuff. And there is something quite frustrating about that, if you're passionate about your subject and you're passionate about your content. But in theory, you could design a program, and somebody else could come along and teach very, very different content to meet those same outcomes. And the argument would be, when you look at outcomes, if the outcomes are too content-specific, they're not very good outcomes, because they restrict you too much into what you can actually teach. So at the module level, you would tend to avoid over-specifying subject content. There's another section where you write indicative content for a program. But the outcomes, you try and keep them at a fairly non-subject-specific level.

Speaker 2: Can I just ask, at what level then, because presumably at some level, a decision is made about content, and it's adjusted out to the individual tutor. So at what level is that decision made?

Speaker 1: When you write the validation document, the module specification, you would put in indicative content. But the reason they call it indicative content is that there is actually an opportunity to change it. You can change it. And in certain subjects, at certain times, it is perfectly acceptable for an individual tutor to actually do something different. But it will vary, depending on the nature of the program, whether, in fact, the content is, in some programs, you're teaching, as we do, of course, you're teaching law, or you're teaching some aspects of finance. And actually, the content, in a sense, is important, to a certain degree. And obviously, you specify that in the learning outcomes. But the argument would be that content itself is important. It should be specified. So you might have a learning outcome that would say, it's important for people to understand European commercial law. Well, European commercial law is clearly content, but it's perfectly acceptable to write that into an outcome, because that is what you want to be assessed on at the end. It's their ability to use that, and to analyze it, and synthesize it, and relate it to experience or practical examples, and so on. So this is a fairly simple idea that says that if I use a verb within an intended learning outcome, I might expect to see that verb used in the teaching activities. Now, this is where we get into some interesting issues, then, about whether, in fact, you should be duplicating the verb that's used in the intended learning outcome in your topic outcomes, which is the conversation I've had with Amanda. Do you actually take the module-level learning outcome and, in a sense, replicate it as topic-level, repeatedly? And if so, why and how? So that's something that I think is contested, but we're going to talk about that a little bit as well. The second notion, again, this comes from Biggs' work, is that these things have some sense of progression to them. So you'll start to recognize some of the notion of language and levels in it. So there's this notion that a certain level, so we have competence at the top, incompetence at the bottom, and the notion that we go from an understanding of a single aspect through to the ability to extend that knowledge to a new domain. So the language that Biggs uses, as we say, this is before anyone has anything structured in terms of their knowledge, unistructural. They have a single aspect of that particular area. Then they're able to start bringing together multiple things within that domain, then drawing relationships between them, and then taking them out and extending them to another. So my question to you is, you'll recognize some of the words, these are illustrative verbs that indicate that progression. Where do you think level four, five, six, and seven come on those columns? Have a chat between you, and decide if you can agree whether there's a fit, and if there is, what fit is. My idea is, the reason I'm showing you this is, when you work with the official documentation, when you work with a list of verbs, whoever it was produced by, there is ambiguity. And the ambiguity is not something to resist. It's actually where the creativity happens. Creativity happens on the edge. So there isn't a nice, neat fit. It isn't that he didn't write it with the QAA levels in mind, so the columns don't fit. The notion of progression does. The notion that you go from level three, four, five, six, seven, yes, there's a clear sense that if you ignore the verbs, and just think in terms of the ability to do this process, and to build, to take the ability to start relating things, then it starts to feel a little bit more like we've got level three to four to five to six. It sort of starts to feel that way. But even then, you would have some variation. And that's largely based on the ability to build on what you already have, as you just said. And the interesting thing when you look at the verbs is the verbs, in a sense, are illustrative, but again, highly contested. And as my wife pointed out, it's spelled wrong. She's got a thing about American spelling that says or z's, as I like to say, just for occasional. So these two things are quite important. And I want you to just kind of hold this idea in your head. And then I'm going to make things even more ambiguous in just a second, which is to say, yes, we want to find this alignment, and therefore the verbs become important. But the verbs don't, in their own right, specify level. They can't, because it depends on context. It doesn't depend specifically on content, but it does depend on the learning context in which the learners take the first step. So that's very important. And when we come to then specify objectives, one of my concerns about taking learning outcomes at a modular level and starting to try and replicate them is that we aren't necessarily within a module recognizing that same progression. I'm sure you're encountering that in your practice. But what they're expected to do as an objective in week two isn't necessarily what you might expect to do as an objective in week 12. Because although the verbs could actually be in a fairly low order in week two or three, while they orientate themselves through the domain and they learn about basic subject areas so that they can, as you say, do understand what law is and where to find it before they then start trying to apply it. So within a single module, we might expect to see that same level of progression.