PGA Case Study on Blended Learning
The Postgraduate Award in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy is a course offered to University colleagues (including PGRs) who are teaching or supporting learning in an interdisciplinary context. On this course, participants learn to critically evaluate interdisciplinarity and its variants with a focus on inter-, trans-, and non-disciplinary approaches as they relate to pedagogic practice. It encourages participants to work as co-collaborators, while guided by workshops and tutorials that are facilitated by Co-Convenors based in IATL, and Guest Speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds, and who are actively engaged in interdisciplinary teaching and learning in different fields and environments. Participants on this course are regularly encouraged to integrate their own experiences, knowledge and reflections into the workshops and tutorials – allowing the cohort to collaborate and synthesise knowledge as the themes are introduced and explored on the course.
While this course began as a purely face-to-face provision in IATL, the pandemic brought opportunities to reimagine the learning experience to become even more accessible, more inclusive, and more diverse after blended iterations commenced as of 2020.
Pre-Pandemic Iterations
As with most IATL modules, the Postgraduate Award in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy experienced a period of reimagination following the onset of challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to this period, this course was offered as a face-to-face provision, delivered by IATL staff to small cohorts largely based in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and in some capacity, already working with/within IATL.
Prior to the pandemic, the PGA course ran between January and September, with monthly face-to-face workshops located in IATL seminar rooms between January and March, and face-to-face, small group tutorial sessions running intermittently between January and July, to consolidate learning and encourage assessment literacy.
Assessment included a selection of reflective blog entries (25%); a presentation of the selected ID case study (25%) and a portfolio of evidence (50%).
Post-Pandemic Iterations
The PGA Interdisciplinary Pedagogy underwent a review following feedback insights from alumni (including a focus group session) and those gained more broadly from the teaching and learning that took place in IATL during the pandemic. This led to opportunities for change including:
- To build a more inclusive provision and broaden the reach of the PGA course across the three faculties at Warwick, the course was moved to a flexible, hybrid approach which takes into account new hybrid working conventions. Workshops are delivered on MS Teams to the entire cohort – making the sessions more easily accessible; and small group tutorials are run largely face-to-face, though offer participating colleagues the opportunity (if need be) to attend online. In this sense, the tutorials are run hybrid.
- To facilitate an even greater student-centred, active learning environment for workshops and tutorials, the course offers online audio/visual content designed and delivered in a pre-recorded format (or similar) by PGA Alumni. This has three advantages: first, it creates a sense of continuity and community amongst the course participants and alumni who can co-create the content for future iterations. Second, it offers an online learning space for participating colleagues to experience alternative formats of learning materials. And third, it provides a diverse range of examples of how interdisciplinary pedagogy is conceptualised and practiced around the University to inform participating colleagues’ learning journey.
- This blended approach also allows for more diversity when it comes to contributions on the course: guest speakers can provide content and attend the workshops from great distances and from diverse academic contexts without having to attend in person.
- The post-pandemic context asserts a new relevance of reflective blogging as a form of assessment and developing professional skills, as well as a new contextual backdrop that supports the assignment of (recording) and presenting research on an online platform like MS Teams.