A set of leaked Faculty Education Committee (FEC) documents from a Faculty of Arts and Humanities meeting in May 2021 have revealed several of King’s College London’s (KCL) plans for upcoming years, up until 2029.
The documents contain information relating to degree programmes and module grading frameworks across the entire faculty. The plans outlined therein have yet to be publicly confirmed by the university.
A headline of KCL’s “Vision 2029” plan is the establishment of a new entity referred to as “King’s Education”. A merger of prior educational bodies and KCL’s new online education infrastructure, the branch will also include a director of “King’s Online”, suggesting a willingness to retain aspects of virtual learning brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Educational subsets of the Faculty may also be reorganised as well. The Modern Language Centre (MLC), which recently separated from the Faculty umbrella, is “not operating well enough on its own”, and currently exists in the “worst of both world” according to our source, who requested anonymity. A proposed solution to this issue, currently under examination, would be the merger of language departments into one centralised unit.
These aspects of Vision 2029 culminate in a sub-plan called “Curriculum 2029”, designed as a way for KCL to “include service-led learning with an emphasis on experience”. The university’s “Flexible Undergraduate Curriculum”, scheduled for introduction in 2024/25, will allow the majority of students to take a maximum of 105 credits outside of their home departments, rendering joint honours programmes (AKA “with” programmes) redundant. Introductory 15-credit modules are also planned to be introduced to participating students in order to bridge inter-departmental gaps.
The documents also mention changes to marking schemes across the university, in an effort to create a standardised scheme for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The committee recommends departments shift their focus toward formative assessments, with the method of delivery for those assessments – and their summative counterparts – being re-evaluated. The Faculty reports concerns that the 24-hour assessments utilised during the pandemic remove the trackable skill of “working efficiently under pressure”, as well as make students feel they have to work longer than the recommended assessment period.
In an effort to address this, according to the documents, the Faculty is considering the adoption of a no-proctoring policy, with formats such as coursework, essays, practice exams, or presentations replacing more typical assessments. These will allow markers to utilise a “less granular marking scheme” to supplement the current 1-100% format. A recommendation has also been made to reduce the length of dissertations to 8,000 words from the current 10,000.
Where exams are still held, the College is piloting use of end-to-end exam suites such as WISEflow or BetterExaminations, neither of which feature proctoring but can include facial recognition software. These online exams could be held in traditional exam venues as a form of in-person digital assessment.
About the author
