Exciting Changes…

The new academic year at Middlesex is truly a bit of a big bang - we have changed all courses, every module and updated just about everything we teach (and how we teach it). While it was a pretty stressful few months last year to get all the new courses validated, the real work is happening now, with all the changes put into practice.
The great news is, that there is a lot of exciting things happening: For a start, our MA in Health & Social Marketing, which already made the headlines in the local press - and is the first specialised Master in this exciting field in the UK.
Continuing on a related topic, we are also launching a totally new module in Service Learning, meaning that students can get credits for working on marketing projects in the voluntary sector. Again, it is a relatively new thing in good old Europe, though already a big thing in the US, Canada, Australia and New Yealand. Time for us to catch up, get our students out in the community and give them the chance to have a really rewarding and at the same time rich education experience (and definitely a lot more engaging than case studies in a book!).
Among the other exciting changes are really interesting ways in which we engage with students. Last year Lynne Eagle, who sadly moved to UWE, and I trialled Blogs as a means for getting students to engage more and to foster deep learning. The feedback was amazingly positive, and the results even more amazing! So this year, we are keeping blogs in one module and we are adding wikis in another, providing yet more possibilities for collaborative, deep learning connecting academia and the real world. More details will follow soon!
So while I have been totally consumed with trzing to set up all these things and get them ready for the start in a few days, I have to say that it is great to design exciting new stuff (and I have to say a big thank you to those colleagues who are helping me, share experience and are giving useful suggestions to get this right! Thanks!)

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