Janne Skakon, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen

Course coordination of Work & Organizational Psychology - Can the principles of relational coordination incorporated into the course coordinator role strengthen constructive alignment?

Course coordination is today a task assigned to a lecturer (VIP), which thereby become responsible for the subject at BA and / or MA level. How the task is performed depends on the person responsible. The coordination task consists formally in planning the series of 14 lectures, including agreeing with internal and external lecturers defining the curriculum, hiring instructors for classroom lessons as well as to formulate examination questions that completes the course.

The Work & Organizational Psychology lecture series is held by 10 lecturers, half of whom are part-time lecturers. A lecturer delivers one or two lectures, and is in most cases not acquainted with the broader didactic context he or she is taking part in.

Classroom lessons with instructors, is a relatively new initiative in the Work & Organizational Psychology course. This educational set-up has been conducted one time previously, where planning and conducting the lessons were delegated to the instructor group without interference from the course coordinator.

The purpose of my educational project is to design and test a course co-ordination model, which integrate the various course elements and thereby ideally strengthen the possibility of deep learning occurring in students of Work & Organizational Psychology on BA level. The model is based on Biggs and Tang's theory of constructive alignment (2007), and is furthermore inspired by the principles of relational coordination (Gittell 2001).