Seize The Day!

Carpe Diem is a well-researched, well-rehearsed team-based model for promoting change in learner-centred e-learning design and assessment, institutional capacity building and innovation.

At the heart of Carpe Diem is a two-day workshop in which discipline-specific course teams, in collaboration with subject librarians and learning technologists, plan, implement and review student-centred e-learning designs, focusing on learner activity, group work and assessment for learning. By the end of the second day, course teams have a blueprint and storyboard for their course, a set of peer-reviewed online learning activities (or e-tivities) running on their institutional virtual learning environment (VLE), a transferable model for e-tivity design and a practical action plan.

The Carpe Diem process comprises:

• A pre-workshop meeting for motivation and preparation. Our facilitator will meet with core members of the course team to clarify the aims of the course they intend to design for, explore what material already exists and what ideas the course team have agreed on.
• The two-day Carpe Diem workshop: The practical workshop involves a small course team in a single discipline (4 to 20 participants), a subject librarian and a learning technologist. The workshop takes place on two consecutive days, normally from 10 to 4.30. All team members must attend on both days. The workshop is run in a computer lab. At the University of Leicester, they are hosted by the Media Zoo.
• Follow-up meeting to review the latest state of the online course with the course team, and fine-tune the work done at and since the workshop. This normally takes between half a day and one day. It is conducted in a computer room.

The Carpe Diem process:

• achieves successful, productive, collaborative working between academics, tutors, learning designers, librarians and technologists;
• exploits low-cost, high-impact technologies;
• focuses e-learning on learner activity and group work;
• is practical, outcomes-based;
• is based on 20 years of research into low-cost networked learning and five years of researching, developing and testing;
• offers a high return on investment of a small amount of time;
• reinforces the concept of design once, deliver many times.

Carpe Diem is suitable for:

• the design of new courses and re-design of existing ones;
• campus, blended and distance modes;
• any level (e.g. HE, FE, lifelong learning, work-based learning, etc.);
• any short course, unit, module or programme;
• any discipline;
• any VLE.

You will need:

• a course team willing to commit to two full days of their time;
• a module or programme the team needs to design, or an existing one that needs re-vamping;
• access to the electronic resources that the team will use in their course, as well as the ‘module specification’, which should include details such as learning outcomes and assessment procedures;
• a ‘reality checker’, who will join in for an hour at about 1pm on Day 2 of the workshop. Their role is to review and offer feedback on the work done by the course team.

References for further reading

Armellini, A. and Jones, S. (2008) Carpe Diem: seizing each day to foster change in e-learning design. Reflecting Education, Vol 4 (1) (pp. 17-29). Available at: http://tinyurl.com/58q2lj.

Salmon, G.; Jones, S. and Armellini, A. (2008) Building institutional capability in e-learning design. ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology, Vol 16 (2) (pp. 95-109).