Earlier this year, we were delighted to learn that our proposal had been successful as part of QAA's Collaborative Enhancement Project (CEP) scheme, jointly funded with Medr, the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research in Wales. The project set out to address a problem familiar to anyone who has sat in a validation panel or tried to explain a programme structure to a new colleague: curriculum design is often documented in detail, but rarely made visible. Specifications, module handbooks and mapping grids capture what a programme contains, but they do not easily show how it hangs together across a full 30-week academic year, or how activities, assessment and progression relate to one another in practice.
Our response has been to design and build a curriculum visualiser, a standalone, browser-based tool intended for use by programme teams and by our HE in FE partners. Because it runs as a self-contained HTML file, it requires no institutional licence, no login and no specialist IT support to open. This was a deliberate choice from the outset. A tool that only works within one university's system is of limited value to a genuinely collaborative, cross-sector project; a tool that opens in any browser is one that any programme team, in any institution, can pick up and use.
Since starting the project, we have taken the visualiser through three iterations, each shaped by feedback from the colleagues actually using it. The current version presents a 30-week grid as its central view, with colour-coded activities that let a team see at a glance how teaching, assessment and independent study are distributed across the year. A dual-row system allows two strands of activity, such as taught content and work-based learning, to be tracked in parallel without the grid becoming unreadable. A slide-out drawer gives access to the detail behind each entry, so the high-level view and the granular module information sit within the same tool rather than being split across separate documents. A Module Registry tab consolidates the underlying module data in one place, and a save and load functionality means teams can save their work, return to it, and share files with colleagues or with us for support.
None of this has been developed in isolation. The project is jointly led by Jemma and Laura from the Cardiff Met side, with Vicky acting as partner lead from the HE in FE provision at Cardiff and Vale College and the shape of the tool has been driven as much by conversations with programme teams as by our own initial design assumptions. What began as a fairly simple grid has, through that process, become something closer to a working planning environment, and the next phase of the project will focus on wider testing across partner institutions and on refining the tool in response to that use.
It is worth saying why this matters beyond the immediate convenience of a better planning tool. Programme design is a collaborative, often iterative process, and much of that collaboration currently happens through static documents that are difficult to update and harder still to interpret quickly. A shared, visual way of seeing a curriculum has the potential to make review, revalidation and quality assurance conversations more productive, because teams and reviewers alike can see the shape of a programme rather than reconstructing it from separate pieces of paperwork. That is the underlying ambition of this CEP, and it is why the cross-border, cross-sector nature of the funding, spanning Wales's university and further education contexts, felt like the right vehicle for it.
We are still in the early stages of what we hope will be a useful contribution to the sector, but the progress so far has been encouraging. If you are reading this from within Cardiff Met, you will likely hear more about this as it develops. If you are reading it from elsewhere in the sector, particularly if you have wrestled with the same problem of making a curriculum visible rather than just documented, we would be glad to hear from you.
