Module Progress: Working with Career Destinations

I must confess that an aspect of this project that has been most challenging and problematic thus far, specifically concerning the creation of our module’s Blackboard site, is the need to rein in the plethora of ideas we have had regarding possible online resources to complement the module’s lecture content. Realistically, there is only so much we can include and advertise to students as beneficial tools without overloading them with an excess of content and potentially reducing the prominence of the most relevant and essential resources.

This difficulty has been ongoing, primarily because we hadn’t had the opportunity to engage with Kathryn Wood and Karl Anton of Career Destinations in a long meeting to actually view their proposed lecture content. This would allow us to be selective and narrow down which of our ideas would best fit around the lecture content and support students in their completion of the module as well as any resultant independent activity beyond the curriculum.

Thankfully, this week, Amber and I finally had such an opportunity to meet with Career Destinations, who had slides in draft form ready to present to us, as well as feedback for us based on our meeting last week in which we discussed our initial (and perhaps somewhat overzealous!) ideas for the structure of our Blackboard site.

This meeting was hugely helpful as it allowed Amber and me to give our feedback on their slides and suggest ideas for increased interactivity and innovation in terms of how the module is delivered, as well as possible shifts in focus that may be needed. We also suggested making the slides more visually appealing but, obviously, they were only draft slides and aesthetics are not so important at this stage at any rate!

More importantly though, as a result of having viewed the proposed lecture slides, we were able to begin discussing with Career Destinations what sort of resources and content may be best included on Blackboard and what structure the site should take. Karl also opened our eyes to some very interesting and potentially useful online resources that we will investigate further next week as we attempt to draw our ideas together.

Over the next few weeks we are hoping to put down on paper a drawn up and revised proposal of the Blackboard module structure which highlights not only the general content we wish to include, but also the specific, specially selected resources we would want to incorporate as relevant materials linked to each individual lecture.

This progress, made as a result of working closely with Kathryn and Karl from Career Destinations, has provided us with much more clarity and a huge amount of motivation moving forward. We shall be liaising regularly and continuing to use Career Destinations as our first port of call for feedback and advice.

Both Karl and Kathryn have been absolutely fantastic in providing us with their invaluable advice as career advisers as well as being genuinely interested, enthusiastic and accommodating of our ideas and suggestions. We cannot wait to see this module come together and I personally look forward to continuing to collaborate with Career Destinations in a way that will allow us to share ideas and ultimately create an engaging, innovative, and sustainable module that lives up to its ambitious aims and its exciting potential!

That’s all I wish to say for now. In my next post I will finally discuss my progress in the challenging task of establishing an External Advisory Board of employers to function alongside – and hopefully work in conjunction with – the module in a way that significantly aids not only Humanities students but also the Faculty as a whole. Stay tuned!