22 About the Discovery Delivery Group
The Discovery Delivery Group (DDG) formed in September 2023 and includes representatives from the following groups:
- Academics.
- Students.
- Professional Services, Digital Education Service (DES) and Learning Design Team.
- Organisational Development and Professional Learning (OD&PL).
- Sustainability Service.
- Quality Assurance.
The DDG co-creates a complementary Discovery provision that extends lifelong and lifewide participatory and experiential learning opportunities. It demonstrates a creative, cross-disciplinary and collaborative approach, empowering learners to be action-orientated in addressing some of the big challenges of our times (British Science Association, 2022).
This group organised a series of task and finish groups, each with specific roles and responsibilities. The working practices and processes were rooted in people-centred design. This dynamic, collaborative design process brings together diverse perspectives, ideas and experiences.
Designing with end users and stakeholders is one of the fundamental characteristics of people-centred design. This involves creative and critical exploration, discourse and analysis, rapid prototyping, testing and ongoing evaluation and learning, wider consultation and ongoing adjustments to the designs (Lockwood, 2010).
Furthermore, the DDG used principles of developmental evaluation, actively experimenting and questioning in an effort to address complexity while co-creating the broadening blueprints to develop diverse transformative learning opportunities (Preskill and Beer, 2012).
The DDG’s task and finish groups enabled collaborative working in smaller teams. Other colleagues. community members and students engaged with the DDG in sharing their insights, ideas and thoughts. These included plans and emerging processes, and ideas for implementation during the piloting stages.
Conversations and debates were at the heart of the people-centred design process (Grabill, Gretter and Skogsberg, 2022). These included playful approaches, such as the use of the e-pizza game (Nerantzi et al., 2023) to further boost openness, creative and critical thinking and imagine new possibilities for student education (James and Nerantzi, 2019). Not only did these enable the group to generate ideas, solve problems and create new possibilities for course design, they also brought members of the groups closer together.
The DDG has already designed new, distinct Discovery modules in the form of open container modules for undergraduate and postgraduate students across the University.
In addition, the DDG has seized the opportunity to engage in design work relating to broadening the Curriculum Redefined programme at the University of Leeds and to aligning with the Sustainable Curriculum principle of the University’s Climate Plan to enable all students to engage with sustainability challenges in a creative, hopeful and action-oriented way. This provides a learning scaffold for new Discovery modules in the form of low-stakes, non-credit-bearing blueprints for Broadening courses in alternative formats (for example, Open, Block and Jam). These can expand future learning opportunities brought into the curriculum via new Discovery modules.
