Abstract

This session focusses on the technical process of collaborative resource creation by the Digital Education team to share examples of innovative academic practice employing digital solutions to pedagogical challenges. The process follows identifying example case studies, capturing detail and content from academics into a standardised format, and finally the template for publishing inspiring and informative outputs. We created 12 Digital Learning Recipes that provide digital solutions to teaching and assessment challenges to enable academic to employ them within their own disciplines. Recipes, as an analogy, is commonly applied to the design of learning due to their inherent flexible structure and easy to follow steps. These recipes are intended to be visually inspiring whilst also providing sufficient information for academics to recreate, adopt and develop the activities.
The recipes created offer teaching, learning and assessment activities under the categories of Production, Investigation, Acquisition, Discussion, Collaboration, and Practice. These categories intentionally align with and extend support for the ABC curriculum design model (UCL) to allow recipe activities to be embedded within the curriculum as part of the ABC model. Programmes or Modules can be designed and mapped out to incorporate a range of learning styles using the ABC model, and the Digital Learning Recipes both facilitate this, and add digital capabilities to the concept.
Creating the recipes for publication was a design challenge executed using the Adobe Creative Cloud suite; specifically InDesign and Photoshop. All images used were either sourced directly from the academics involved or were sourced from online libraries with Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licenses. In order to work collaboratively in the creation of these documents, the Digital Education Team utilised cloud storage of files and designed a universal template within InDesign. This template was then populated using Adobes data-led-graphics workflow to pull in text and images and create individual documents for each recipe. The information was fed from a shared Office 365 spreadsheet collaboratively created by the team. The populated InDesign files were individually checked and minor modifications to design and layout made manually. The resulting workflow allows recipe files to be modified, updated, and new recipes easily created simply by modifying the underlying spreadsheet. The same workflow allowed additional A6 index cards to be created quickly and easily.