Creating Aligned Interactive educational Resources Opportunities – CAIeRO

The primary mechanism for course (re)design at Northampton is the CAIeRO process. If you would like help with any aspect of course (re)design – from a 1:1 session looking at a particular aspect of your module or programme (for example, Learning Outcomes, storyboarding, assessment practices etc), through to a full collaborative (re)design workshop (the CAIeRO), then please contact the  Learning Design team.

CAIeRO – Creating Aligned Interactive educational Resource Opportunities is Northampton’s distinct version of the  Carpe Diem  workshop. It is a transformational process that develops institutional capability in learning design (Conole, 2012) by enabling academic course teams to design for effective, participative learning (Armellini & Jones, 2008; Salmon, Jones, & Armellini, 2008; Salmon, 2011). At its heart, is a structured process (Armellini, Salmon, & Hawkridge, 2009). The ‘planner’ used in the workshop is itself an open resource.

CAIeRO delivers a blueprint and a storyboard for the course being designed or redesigned, a set of tested e-tivities (Salmon, 2002) and an action plan for the course team to develop the course further. CAIeRO’s transformative nature has enabled staff and students to capitalise on the affordances of many learning technologies and existing learning resources, which participants integrate into the design and delivery of curricula.” (Armellini and Nie, 2013).

CAIeRO is a flexible process helping programme teams design effective, constructively aligned active blended learning which addresses student and employment needs and aligns with UON academic regulations and quality approval processes. Typically facilitated by a member of the Learning Design team, a CAIeRO may be planned as a series of short workshops or full day sessions, delivered face-to-face and/or online, to best meet the needs, availability and preferences of the programme team.

The CAIeRO process can be applied to various requirements of curriculum development, which are expanded on below:

• Programme level design
• Module level design
• Session level design

Have a look at the references below to find out more about CAIeRO or Carpe Diem. These references are all cited on our CAIeRO web area.

• Armellini, A., & Aiyegbayo, O. (2010). Learning design and assessment with e-tivities. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(6), 922-935. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01013.x
• Armellini, A., & Jones, S. (2008). Carpe Diem: Seizing each day to foster change in e-learning design.  Reflecting Education, 4(1), 17-29.
• Armellini, A., Salmon, G., & Hawkridge, D. (2009). The Carpe Diem journey: Designing for learning transformation. In T. Mayes, D. Morrison, H. Mellar, P. Bullen, & M. Oliver (Eds.), Transforming higher education through technology-enhanced learning (pp. 135-148). York: The Higher Education Academy.
• Salmon, G. (2013). E-tivities: the key to active online learning (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge (see especially chapter 4).
• Salmon, G., Jones, S., & Armellini, A. (2008). Building institutional capability in e-learning design. Research in Learning Technology, 16(2), 95-109.
• Salmon, G., & Wright, P. (2014). Transforming teaching through Carpe Diem learning design. Education Sciences, 4, 52-63. doi: 10.3390/educsci4010052
• Usher, J., & Farmer, R. (2018). Benefits and limitations of a collaborative approach to course design. Educational Developments 19(2), pp. 24-27.
• Usher, J., MacNeill, S. and Creanor, L. (2018). Evolutions of Carpe Diem for learning design.
  Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching, 11(1), pp.1-8. doi: 10.21100/compass.v11i1.718