Led by Professor Leanne de Main, Pro-Vice Chancellor – Pedagogic Transformation, Interim Dean – Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University @professor-c.bsky.social

From 2022, De Montfort University (DMU) embarked on a new education strategy becoming the first university in the UK to transform over 90% of its undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum to a Block mode of scheduling and learning.

What is Block?

Block design sees students studying one subject at a time, completing the module and all assessment by the end of the Block. This model contrasts with traditional models in which students study several modules at a time with varying assessment submission points, often culminating in several end-of-year assessments within a short time frame.

At DMU, students study one 30 credit module in each seven-week block. Timetabled teaching occurs in weeks one to six with the seventh week being reserved as assessment submission week. See Figure 1 below for an overview of a regular Block scheduled undergraduate programme. The slight difference for postgraduate students is that they continue into Block five and six to complete a final project or dissertation.

Fig 1. Block Learning at De Montfort University (Undergraduate)

Why Block?

Whilst DMU might be the first in the UK to move to Block learning at an institutional level, there are several examples of the Block model over decades at varying levels of adoption. There are also several examples of whole institutional transitions outside of the UK. Colorado College, US, introduced The Block Plan over 50 years ago, and Victoria University, Australia, launched the VU Block Model® several years before DMU’s launch. The Block community is incredibly collaborative, at DMU we received guidance and support from several Block pioneers, including Victoria University, Southern Cross University (The Southern Cross Model) and the University of Suffolk (Block and Blend).

Our journey to Block explored the impact of Block learning through the research and experiences of others, whilst understanding the complexity of our students and the varying challenges they may face in Higher Education. Our key aims for the transition were to enhance student satisfaction and create an environment where more students were retained and progressed in their studies.

Buck and Tyrell (2022) found that Block teaching had a positive impact on student confidence, time management, learning, achievement and concentration. Immersive scheduling, such as Block, when combined with an active, guided pedagogy can enhance student achievement and satisfaction (Goode et. al. 2023).

Slevin (2021) identified that Block teaching was better able to accommodate the interrelated academic and wellbeing challenges that may students today experience. It also supports the development of more positive peer networks and supports feelings of community and belonging (Jones 2018), this was further evidenced by Turner et al. (2021) who found that cohorts bonded more quickly.

Like most universities, we find students declaring disabilities and neurodiversity has increased. Dixon and O’Gorman (2020) found Block to be particularly advantageous for neurodiverse learners and for those from diverse backgrounds. The consistency and stability that Block scheduling provides supports students more holistically (Meehan and Howells 2019). However, there has been some concern that students who may need to miss a week or two due to illness or disability may find it difficult to catch up with missed learning opportunities, this is a factor that needs consideration in designing learning activities.

Data from DMU’s internal student satisfaction surveys have certainly seen an increase in the satisfaction of teaching and learning. We have also seen in increase in student retention and first-pass rates across many of our programmes, an early indication that our initial aims are being met. A number of academics at DMU have engaged in evaluation and scholarly collaborative research to understand the impact of Block teaching further.

References

Buck, E. and Tyrrell, K. (2022) Block and Blend: A mixed methos investigation into the impact of a pilot block teaching and blended learning approach upon student outcomes and experience. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 46(8), 1078-1091.

Dixon, L., and O’Gorman, V. (2020) ‘Block teaching’ – exploring lecturers’ perceptions of intensive modes of delivery in the context of undergraduate education, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 44:5, 583-595.

Goode, E., Roche, T., Wilson, E., & McKenzie, J. W. (2023). Implications of immersive scheduling for student achievement and feedback. Studies in Higher Education, 48(7), 1123–1136.

Jones, S. (2017) “Disrupting the Narrative: Immersive Journalism in Virtual Reality.” Journal of Media Practice 18 (2–3): 171–185.

Meehan, C. and Howells, K. (2019) In search of the feeling of ‘belonging’ in higher education: undergraduate students transition into higher education, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 43:10, 1376-1390.

Slevin, T. (2021). Block Teaching in Art and Design: Pedagogy and the Student Experience. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(2), 163-183.

Turner, R., Webb, O.J. and Cotton, D.R. (2021) ‘Introducing immersive scheduling in a UK university: Potential implications for student attainment’, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 45(10), pp.1371-1384.

Useful Links

Block Teaching at DMU: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/empowering-university/block-teaching/index.aspx

Our QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project: https://learninblock.dmu.ac.uk/

Our latest Advance HE Collaborative Development Project: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-development-fund/2024-25/imagining-block-enacting-block-insights-design-and-delivery-educational-change

Join the Block Community on JISCMail https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=LEARNINBLOCK

Times Higher Education articles from educators all collated in one place https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/collections/what-block-teaching

Author Biography

Leanne is an experienced senior leader in Higher Education, currently as Professor of Education, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Interim Dean at De Montfort University. She is a Principal Fellow with Advance HE (PFHEA), holds the CMBE with the Chartered Association of Business Schools, is a member of the British Academy of Management (BAM), an Advance HE Aurora Mentor and an Associate Member of the Association of Learning Technology (ALT).

Leanne is a Peer Reviewer for the European Federation of Management Development (EFMD) supporting Business Schools globally in achieving EFMD accreditation. In January 2022, Leanne joined the Advisory Group for the QAA review of Business and Management Benchmark Statements and has recently completed two QAA funded Collaborative Enhancement Projects looking at student experience post-covid and Block Teaching. In January 2025, Leanne won funding from Advance HE and is collaborating with international universities on Block 2.0.

Leanne researches teaching and learning, neurodiverse learners, widening participation and opportunity in HE with a focus on curriculum design models, Block teaching and design sprint methodology: a strategic transformation she led as Associate PVC Education at DMU. Her TEF-focused book, ‘Achieving Teaching Excellence‘ was released in 2021. More recently, in January 2025, her chapter on ‘Quality in Block Teaching’ was published in ‘Block Teaching Essentials’.

Led by Liz Cable @lizcable.bsky.social

There are a lot of terms associated with the use of games in learning, teaching and assessment. We’ve had previous #LTHEchats tagged game-based learning, gamification, ludic pedagogy, playful learning, serious games and role-playing. I believe we don’t talk enough about analogue game-based learning (GBL), which is a peculiarly frustrating study as the term GBL in the literature usually assumes a digital game, rather than a physical one. It’s also often confused with gamification.

Gamification is the use of mechanics found in games for the purpose of learning. This could include earning stars for your nametag as a server at McDonalds or earning a “Top Fan” badge for participation in your favourite Facebook group. Badges can be useful for scaffolding learning, and leaderboards can be motivating for students and help them benchmark their progress, but these features of gamification do not make the learning experience itself into a game . Perhaps a term like “ludification” might better express the design aims of game-based learning which are to make the experience as game-like as possible. This means designing for fun, as well as for the player autonomy that comes from a clear set of rules and sufficient world-building to define the structure and boundaries of the learning experience.

The circumstances of a successful tabletop game, whether role-playing, cooperative  board game, team challenge, pub quiz, escape game, or megagame are exactly the circumstances that we design for in an interactive classroom; participants who don’t necessarily know each other working together by combining their skills and knowledge, with a clear mission to complete, an expectation of fun and probability of success, whilst practising their social and soft skills as a by-product of these circumstances. They share the materials, ask questions, listen to each other, piece together the scenario then solve it, in whatever game format (or mix of formats) you have chosen to emulate. They share surprise, wonder, empathy, curiosity, challenge and success along the way – the aesthetics of a learning game in Hunicke’s (2004) Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics framework.

In this ideal scenario, players are left unperturbed by the personal exposition which is a feature of many “ice-breaker” style games (Cable, 2019), instead the materials of the game become the social objects (Engeström, 2005) around which the conversation is held: a piece of evidence in a police investigation, a character description of a resident in a flood scenario, a newsflash that gives a sense of urgency and geographically locates the problem on a map. Students can adopt the mantle of the expert (Heathcote & Herbert, 1985) and act “as if”, whether inside a scenario or co-creating one.

Scalability is an issue for classroom games. Commercial escape rooms usually have 6 players, board games are the same. In the classroom we need to scale up by duplicating the game enough times for the full class to participate, or by designing a game that makes a mechanism for players communicating between teams. Duplicating is the easiest solution, especially when you can have some digital elements – for example password-protected documents taking the place of physical padlocks – to make a hybrid game. Using the jigsaw classroom (Aronson, 1978), itself a useful technique for encouraging communication and movement, works well to move your students around stations in the classroom, the contents of each station will then contain an ergodic episode in your narrative.

Student attitudes can be a barrier. Undergraduates are at that crucial and contradictory age where they feel they need to put away childish things, so billing your activities as a game may not be your best marketing tactic. However, I defy you to find a student who hasn’t played Uno, or Exploding Kittens, or Cards Against Humanity… I could go on. Still, I find that inviting the students to play-test rather than play a game yields the best results. I ask them for their help in refining a game that’s in prototype, even when it’s been played a hundred times already. There is always room for improvement after all. I now design games that are deliberately broken; like controversy bait on social media, it encourages students to comment and correct, and in doing so, engage and learn.

Games should be designed to make students feel clever, curious and confident, even if that means making part or all of the game themselves. GBL offers a rich, engaging way to foster collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking, alongside the soft and social skills that have suffered. The article shares some key considerations for educators in the creation of game-based learning, including scalability, student attitudes, and design elements to ensure inclusivity and success, as well as the aesthetics – the feelings – provoked by the game, but we have more to learn.

Exploring GBL, sharing experiences, and collaborating on developing meaningful games for higher education is the way forward.

Useful notes

In January 2025 ORCID added a new set of work types for humanities research including teaching materials and by extension classroom games.

The Playful Learning Association is setting up a database of playful activities you can both use and contribute to.

If you have tabletop games of any kind to share, research or playtest with 40,000+ game enthusiasts, consider coming along to the Academic Track at UK Games Expo this year. Drop me a line if you’d like to be involved.

Biography

Liz Cable is programme lead for Digital Marketing at Leeds Trinity University and an expert in creating large-scale games for learning, training and a lot of fun. She is a narrative designer specialising in bringing online games and worlds to life in escape room, LARP and other immersive real-life game formats.

She co-wrote “Unlocking the Potential of Puzzle-based Learning. Designing Escape Rooms and Games for the Classroom” for Corwin.

References

Aronson, E., Blaney, N., Stephan, C., Sikes, J., & Snapp, M. (1978). The jigsaw classroom. Sage.

Cable, L. (2019). Playful interludes. In N. Whitton & A. Moseley (Eds.), Playful learning (pp. 57–70). Routledge.

Engeström, J. (2005, April 13). Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: The case for object-centered sociality. Zengestrom. https://web.archive.org/web/20050413200624/http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html

Heathcote, D., & Herbert, P. (1985). A drama of learning: Mantle of the expert. Theory into Practice, 24(3), 173–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405848509543169

Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI (pp. 1–5). https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/pubs/MDA.pdf

Led by Lee Fallin @leefallin.bsky.social, Tom Tomlinson @tomtomlinson.bsky.social  and Gemma Spencer @gemmaspencer.bsky.social

We are all designers – so how can we get learning resource ‘design’ right?

The role of learning design is often overlooked in Higher Education (HE), but to some extent, we are all designers. As Abegglen et al. (2023) argue, education is not sprung from the Earth – it is designed over time. From the lecturer producing a set of slides for their next class to a professional service colleague making a poster for an event, design is a crucial part of such tasks. Each use of everyday applications and platforms in HE requires design choices. This includes software such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Workspace, and Canva, as well as educational platforms like Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, Panopto, Kahoot! and Mentimeter. 

When using any software or platform, designing inclusive outputs is always the right thing to do. However, there is also an important policy perspective to inclusive learning design. Legislation like the Equality Act (2010) means we have a legal responsibility to ensure our materials and spaces are accessible. Furthermore, The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations legally require public bodies, including universities, to address the accessibility of their content. There are also regulatory frameworks, such as the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and the Office for Students (OfS) expectations, which push us to consider how we can enhance student outcomes for all learners—particularly those from underrepresented groups. 

When we talk about design in teaching and learning, it’s easy to think of it as something ‘extra’—perhaps the fonts and colours we choose or the images and diagrams we add. But in reality, these design decisions form a vital part of how we communicate with our students – inside and outside the classroom or lecture theatre. Inclusive learning design is so important because, in today’s diverse and dynamic HE environment, students arrive with a vast range of prior experiences, cultural backgrounds, and individual learning needs. These learning needs could include alt text for those with an visual impairment, an ability to use text-to-speech for those with dyslexia or the ability to navigate an app without the use of hands (or limbs). Where not met, such needs would lead to a reasonable adjustment request, but we can do better and should preemptively meet such needs wherever possible. For this, we must ask ourselves: Who does our design invite to participate, and who does it leave behind? The real problem is that this isn’t easy. The average professional working in HE isn’t a trained designer. While frameworks like Universal Design for Learning and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) exist, they are complicated – and can be difficult for practitioners to interpret. In recognising these challenges, we designed a HE-focused set of design guidance that could fit on a single sheet: Designing for Diverse Learners. You can read the background to our project online, or check out the guidance here: Designing for Diverse Learners (D4DL). While we would not claim to have addressed every issue, we have produced a clear set of principles that are a solid starting point.

Learn more at https://designingfordiverselearners.info/

Ultimately, embracing inclusive design doesn’t require expensive software or specialist know-how—often, it’s just about making small, deliberate choices. It is a mindset — thinking accessibility and inclusion first. From adding alternative text to images in PowerPoint to structuring Word documents with proper headings, these changes can have a profound effect on accessibility. Once you start thinking about inclusive design, you find it permeates everything, from planning a lecture to setting up group activities or encouraging participation in seminars. The next step is to instill such practices within our students. 

References

Abegglen, S., Burns, T., & Sinfield, S. (2023) Designing education: The role of learning design in higher education. London: Academic Press.

Equality Act (2010) Equality Act 2010, c.15. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents (Accessed: 4 February 2025).

Office for Students (OfS) (n.d.) Regulatory framework for higher education in England. Available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/ (Accessed: 4 February 2025).

Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) (n.d.) Teaching Excellence Framework. Available at: https://www.tef.education.gov.uk/ (Accessed: 4 February 2025).

The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (2018) The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, SI 2018/952. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/952/contents/made (Accessed: 4 February 2025).

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (n.d.) Universal Design for Learning Guidelines. Available at: https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ (Accessed: 4 February 2025).

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (n.d.) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. Available at: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ (Accessed: 4 February 2025).

Biographies

Lee Fallin, University of Hull

Lee Fallin is a Lecturer in Education Studies at the University of Hull. His research focuses on the intersections between education and geography, inclusive of physical and digital spaces. His current research interests include learning spaces and communities, inclusive digital practice, research methodologies and geographies of place.

Thomas Tomlinson, University of Hull

Tom Tomlinson works as an Educational Developer at the University of Hull. Tom develops and promotes excellent teaching. Tom has a background in design and explores the practical application of technology to enhance learning.

Gemma Spencer, University of Central Lancashire

Gemma Spencer is a Registered Nurse and Lecturer in Pre-Registration Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire and holds Fellowship status with Advance HE. Gemma is passionate about using innovative and creative techniques to support accessible and inclusive education for all. Connect with Gemma on LinkedIn. 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the LTHEchat organisers for inviting us to chat, and in particular, thanks to Jorge Freire, who provided valuable feedback. We hope Grammarly has helped us quash the typos, and we would also like to share thanks to our wider D4DL team for their work on the project and comments on this article: Ellie Davison, Kate Wright and Gemma Spencer.