Sitting in our team EDE section meeting and listening to an update from the always engaging Lauren Johnson Smith on recent sign-up figures for online courses. When MSc Ancient Worlds was listed with 67 registered students at launch, it took a second or two for me to register why it was familiar before blurting out “WE DID AN ELDeR LEARNING DESIGN WORKSHOP FOR THAT PROGRAMME”. In fact, it was one of the first I did after taking over the running of ELDeRs from Fiona Hale.

It was a really pleasant surprise, not just the impressive number of students signed up, but it had kind of slipped my memory and it was over 2 years since we did the workshop.  On the  19th and 20th of September 2018,  which highlights some of the issues with measuring and evaluating the efficacy of Learning designs, be it course or programme. The lead-in can be a long way, and difficult to point at it and say oh that’s because of ELDeR.

So, MSc in ancient worlds launched with 67 students, which for. Which for brand new masters is very impressive indeed, and I hope that we had some hand in smoothing or helping in the process from concept, programme descriptions, using personas to think about who their potential students would be, and all the other details an ELDeR helps teams to collaboratively write. Of course, a lot happens or I’m sure many changes take place over such a long period.

‘The ELDeR workshop had far more impact on the overall design and conception of Ancient Worlds, than I would have imagined on arrival on the first morning. It challenged our group to really think about the particular benefits that we wanted the programme to bring – and we spent what seemed like a huge amount of time composing relatively short aims and outcomes – but ones that ultimately made us question what the programme could be. The final session where we composed a very wide non-virtual spreadsheet along the wall of the training room helped us to plan delivery in terms of course offerings and the logistics of Ancient Worlds, and bought things even more to life. We are now in Week 4, have exciting courses running, and coming up, and have a very engaged first cohort of students!’

Dr Joanne Rowland,
Senior Lecturer in Archaeology ; Archaeology and history of Egypt, Egyptian prehistory

Finally, I would like to share some of the feedback from our ELDeR Evaluation, in particular the section on Efficacy, and what happens post-workshop, which is the area that we know least about, as once the ELDeR has finished, people head back to their schools – never to be seen again … kind of

Thanks for reading everybody

Jon