CLaS light touch project: Scaling up educational co-design process

Abstract

Connected Learning at Scale (CLaS) is a significant longitudinal project initiated in 2019 by the University of Sydney Business School aiming to enhance the learning experience for students in large undergraduate and postgraduate classes. Three of us work at Business Co-Design, a team of educational developers, learning designers and media producers, who are among the key drivers of the CLaS project. Before the pandemic, we were working through a co-design process, with eight core subject coordinators for a duration of three semesters, to embed active-learning strategies and connected student participation in relevant and authentic tasks and assessments. Covid-19 and the pivot to online teaching challenged us to scale up our CLaS support system and to develop new codesign strategies that could provide rapid and agile support across more units of study. We were asked to support 36 subjects across five business disciplines within one semester. We termed this the ‘CLaS light touch’project as it offered lighter levels of support, resources, and timeline. The ‘light touch’ checklist functioned as a driver for professional discussions and co-design ideas. The checklist was effective for two reasons: (1) the coordinators could choose or ‘cherry pick’ what they wanted to implement in their units; (2) the checklist provided the teaching team with new ideas to implement in their units.