Providing continuous learning and professional development through a toolkit design

We devised a Continuous Professional Learning and Development (CPLD) initiative for all academic staff in our university, many of whom had limited or no experience of online learning and teaching, to enable them to shift their teaching online in response to the restrictions to campus attendance during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. We adapted the ABC Curriculum Design Framework (UCL, 2018) into a ‘Toolkit’ for online delivery. The Toolkit was aimed at harnessing the features of the ABC Framework identified by its authors (Young & Perović, 2016) via work by JISC, (2012) as appealing to busy academics (rapid and intensive) and as effective for online learning design (robust theoretical underpinning, graphical representations of course designs). Uptake of the CPLD was high, and initial feedback was positive. A year later, we conducted a small-scale qualitative study exploring staff perspectives on the CPLD and their teaching practice. We found some positive benefits of the initiative, but also some less successful outcomes. Our findings show the limitation of metrics-based evaluations of academic development (Bamber, 2013; Bamber & Stefani, 2016), and we present some practical ideas for enhancing the Toolkit.