Built for Higher Education.
Grounded in real pedagogy.

This project was created to address a clear need across the higher education sector: while community-engaged learning was gaining momentum as a powerful pedagogical approach, there was no central, accessible resource that brought together good practice in a way academics could actually use. Colleagues were often developing projects in isolation, learning through trial and error, and missing opportunities to draw on the rich experience already present across institutions. The ambition was to change that, and to do so in a way that felt practical, generous, and rooted in the realities of academic life.

Developed in partnership with the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) and the University of Westminster, the toolkit was designed as an open-access, SCORM-compliant experience hosted on a dedicated microsite. This ensured it could be freely accessed by colleagues across the sector, while still offering the structure and interactivity of a considered learning journey. The design placed usability and discovery at its heart, giving academics the freedom to explore in a way that matched their own interests and needs.

At the core of the experience is an exploratory model built around a central conference floor. From here, learners navigate six distinct areas, each focused on a key dimension of community-engaged learning, from initial project set-up through to delivery, partnership, and reflection. This spatial metaphor gives the toolkit a sense of place and progression, mirroring the feel of attending a live event while allowing users to dip in and out on their own terms.

To ground the content in real-world practice, the toolkit features ten 30-minute interviews with leading voices from across the sector. These conversations capture authentic insight, lived experience, and hard-earned lessons, offering academics a direct line to colleagues who have built and delivered community-engaged projects themselves. Accompanying each of the six sections is a dedicated handout PDF, distilling the key themes into practical guidance that academics can take away and apply when designing their own courses and modules.

The toolkit was intentionally framed as academic professional development, positioning community-engaged learning not as an optional extra, but as a meaningful part of course design and pedagogy. By focusing on the practical decisions academics face, such as how to build partnerships, structure assessment, and support students through community-based work, the experience helps translate principle into practice. It respects the time and expertise of its audience, offering depth without demanding a significant upfront commitment.

Since launch, the toolkit has been presented at the national NCCPE conference and accessed by over 50 colleagues from across the sector, with continued uptake as part of the open-access offer. Its reach reflects the appetite that exists for shared, high-quality resources in this space, and the value of bringing good practice together in one accessible place.

Ultimately, the project shows how thoughtful digital design can strengthen a whole community of practice. By combining expert voices, structured exploration, and practical outputs, the toolkit helps academics move from curiosity to confident delivery, and supports community-engaged learning to thrive across the sector.

This project was developed for the University of Westminster to spotlight and share the rich variety of authentic learning happening across its modules and programmes. The ambition was to move beyond written case studies and create something with more immediacy and emotional pull, a resource that could bring good practice to life in the voices of the people delivering and experiencing it. The result is a growing library of storytelling films designed to inspire, inform, and spark new ideas across the academic community.

At the heart of the project is a collection of over 20 short films, each running between three and five minutes and focused on a specific example of authentic learning in action. Every film is built around a case study narrative, weaving together interviews with academic staff and the voices of students who have taken part in the module. This combination is what gives the series its particular power. Hearing directly from students about how a piece of learning landed, what shifted for them, and why it mattered provides a level of insight that no written summary can replicate.

The films were produced with a clear storytelling craft, designed to feel human and grounded rather than polished to the point of feeling corporate. Each one captures the distinct character of the module and the people behind it, allowing different disciplines, pedagogies, and creative approaches to come through in their own voice. Across the series, this creates a vivid picture of what authentic learning looks like in practice, from experiential projects and live briefs through to community partnerships and industry collaboration.

Rather than sitting within a single module or programme, the films were designed as standalone artefacts, freely available and easy to share. They are gathered together in a curated playlist on Vimeo, giving academic colleagues a single destination where they can browse, explore, and draw inspiration from the breadth of practice on show. This approach removes barriers to access and allows the films to travel widely, whether dropped into a team meeting, shared in a professional development session, or picked up by colleagues working on their own module design.

The primary audience for the series is academic staff, and the intent is firmly rooted in professional development and peer-to-peer learning. By showcasing colleagues sharing their own practice openly, the films help to build a culture in which good ideas circulate freely and academics feel encouraged to experiment, adapt, and develop their own approaches. They also serve as a quiet celebration of the craft and creativity that often goes unseen within day-to-day teaching.

Since launch, the collection has been viewed over 5,000 times and has become a well-used resource across the university, helping to promote new ideas and spark conversations about teaching and learning at every level. Its reach reflects both the appetite for this kind of storytelling and the quality of the practice on display.

Ultimately, the project demonstrates how thoughtful, well-crafted film can become a powerful engine for academic development. By putting real voices and real stories at the centre, it turns good practice into something colleagues can see, feel, and take forward into their own work.

This project was developed for the University of Westminster as part of a strategic shift towards authentic assessment, and a wider refresh of assessment practice and ideas across the institution. The ambition was to give programme leads and module-owning academics a clear, well-grounded resource that supported them to think differently about how their students are assessed. Rather than introducing authentic assessment as an abstract concept, the toolkit was designed to open up the conversation, challenge assumptions, and offer practical ways to translate the thinking into real assessment design.

The intellectual foundations of the toolkit are drawn from the leading voices in the field. Wiggins describes assessment as authentic when it directly examines student performance on worthy intellectual tasks, capturing both a measure of achievement and a meaningful encounter with real-world challenge. Gulikers and colleagues situate authenticity within the context of professional training, while Koh frames authentic assessment as a measure of intellectual ability that demands higher-order thinking and deep subject understanding. McArthur opens the lens further, arguing for three important shifts in how the field thinks about authenticity. From real-world as the world of work to real-world as society. From task performance to why we value the task. And from preserving the status quo to transforming society. UNESCO’s ICT Competency framework reinforces this wider view, locating authentic assessment in real-life situations that reach beyond work alone. Holding these perspectives together, the toolkit invites academics to consider not only how to make assessment more real, but what kind of real they are working towards.

The experience itself is delivered as a SCORM-compliant exploratory toolkit, hosted on the university’s LMS. The structure encourages discovery rather than passive consumption, allowing academic colleagues to navigate the content in a way that suits their context, discipline, and starting point. The exploratory design reflects the nature of the topic. Authentic assessment is not a single technique to be applied uniformly, but a way of thinking that needs to be tested, adapted, and made meaningful within each subject area.

To bring the content to life, the toolkit blends video, theoretical foundations, and a series of interactive activities that compare and contrast traditional and authentic forms of assessment. These activities are designed to surface the differences clearly, helping academics see where their current assessment practice sits on the spectrum and where there might be opportunities to push further. The combination of theory and active engagement ensures the experience moves beyond awareness, equipping colleagues with the language, frameworks, and confidence to start reshaping their own assessment design.

The audience is firmly focused on programme leads and academics responsible for modules and courses, recognising that this is where assessment decisions are made and where meaningful change takes root. By targeting the people closest to the design process, the toolkit creates the conditions for practice to shift across the curriculum.

Since launch, the toolkit has been delivered to over 2,000 staff and wider industry partners, demonstrating both the appetite for this work and the value of a shared, well-grounded resource. It has helped to open up new conversations about what assessment is for and how it can better serve students, the disciplines, and the wider world.

Ultimately, the project shows how thoughtful digital design, anchored in serious scholarship, can support a sector-wide shift in practice. By giving academics the tools to think and act differently, the toolkit moves authentic assessment from theory into the everyday reality of teaching and learning.

This project was developed as a sector-wide initiative, delivered in partnership with the University of Westminster, to strengthen evaluation capability across higher education and beyond. The driver was clear. Evaluation is a critical part of project design, funding accountability, and continuous improvement, yet for many practitioners it remains a difficult and often intimidating area to navigate. The ambition was to demystify the process and give colleagues across the sector a practical resource that met them at their level, helped them think clearly about their own context, and pointed them towards the right approach for their specific project.

The toolkit takes a distinctive structural approach. Rather than offering a single, fixed pathway through the content, it is built around a branched, question-led model. Each section opens with a light layer of theory to ground the user in the key concepts, followed by a set of questions that narrow down their options based on the nature of their project, their goals, and the context they are working in. By the end of the journey, the user is delivered a personalised PDF document that sets out how they should approach their evaluation, tailored to the answers they have given along the way. This shifts the experience from passive consumption to active decision-making, and ensures every colleague leaves with a plan that fits their own work rather than a generic framework.

The journey is guided throughout by a cartoon character who walks the user through each set of questions, providing continuity, warmth, and a clear sense of progression. Bringing this character to life is a series of over 30 short, focused animated videos, knitted together to create the flow and branching logic of the experience. This volume of bespoke video content is what gives the toolkit its richness. Every decision point is supported by a moment of human-feeling guidance, helping to keep complex material accessible and the user engaged from start to finish.

To support understanding, each section includes a dedicated glossary highlighting the key terms relevant to that part of the journey. Evaluation comes with its own language, and getting the terminology right matters. The glossary ensures users build a shared vocabulary as they work through the content, demystifying terms that can otherwise feel like a barrier and helping to build genuine confidence in the subject.

The toolkit is delivered as a SCORM-compliant package, available both through the LMS and via the microsite, ensuring it can be accessed easily by anyone evaluating a project across the sector. The audience is intentionally broad, designed to support colleagues working across different disciplines, project types, and levels of evaluation experience. Whether someone is approaching evaluation for the first time or refining a more established practice, the branching structure flexes to meet them where they are.

The impact of the project lies in its innovative design and the bespoke nature of the educational experience it offers around a notoriously complex topic. By combining theory, branching logic, animated guidance, and a personalised output, the toolkit shifts evaluation from a daunting requirement to a manageable, even enjoyable, part of project work.

Ultimately, the project shows how thoughtful instructional design can take a difficult, technical subject and make it genuinely accessible. By giving every user a tailored route through, the toolkit raises the floor of evaluation practice across the sector, and supports better, more meaningful project work as a result.