We were delighted to welcome Alan Masson and Fiona Doherty from the Viewpoints team from the University of Ulster to visit us again last week.  After our cluster CAMEL meeting in April there has been a flurry of emails between our projects and this latest visit was an opportunity to share tools, development ideas and experiences of working with the academic community.

The Viewpoints team are investigating the use of the principles of assessment that informed the REAP project (www.reap.ac.uk).  Much of the morning session was spent discussing how the REAP team had supported academic staff to translate these principles into curriculum designs that addressed local problems as well as institutional ambitions.  A forthcoming paper by David Nicol and Catherine Owen for SEDA (http://www.seda.ac.uk/) will outline the REAP change model in detail. 

The Viewpoints team shared a number of tools and support materials developed at the NI CETL (http://cetl.ulster.ac.uk/elearning/index.php).  We were particularly interested in the possibilities afforded by their Practice Exchange Repository as a way of describing course design and the practicalities of course delivery in an accessible and efficient way.  This tool supports the creation of "one-stop shop" data about courses that could be re-purposed to support a wide variety of institutional processes. 

Thanks again to Alan and Fiona for sharing their work with us.