23 Rationale

Learning can happen anywhere, at any time, and in any way. It’s critical for universities to create flexible opportunities that enable lifelong personal and professional learning for all. They can do this in partnership and collaboration with communities and industry, to tackle some crucial societal and sustainability challenges we are currently facing.

We have developed this document as part of the Broadening initiative within the Curriculum Redefined programme, a project with an open invitation to reimagine student education at the University of Leeds.

The blueprint courses are part of the reimagining processes. These present alternative ways engage students in learning to learn and provide a scaffold towards self-organised learning via new Discovery modules.

We hope that the institution will consider opening up new Discovery modules to other learners who aren’t currently registered on programmes. Flexible and bite-size forms could recognise learning in the form of micro-credentials (QAA, 2022), broaden and make provision attractive and accessible to new learners. This will be important for universities going forward and will place them at the heart of society as a diverse, open and boundary-crossing learning community (EUA, 2021; UNESCO, 2023).