The block model has operated in mainstream higher education for nearly a decade, moving steadily from the fringes since the short-module, immersive approach to curriculum design emerged in the 1960s. With tens of thousands of students studying under the model in the UK alone, it’s no longer experimental. However, the block plan isn’t perfect. Like any educational framework, it requires reflective implementation and continuous evolution to maintain its effectiveness. This year’s conference for the International Block and Intensive Learning and Teaching Association (IBILTA), held at the University of Suffolk, asked what pressing issues still exist for the model.
Here are the top six responses.
How can the block model reduce isolation of subjects?
Institutions adopting the block work hard to ensure that 12 weeks of semester curriculum isn’t simply squashed into four-, five- or six-week modules. Rather content is reimagined and rebuilt to suit block delivery, where the student is immersed in one subject at a time for a short, intense module before moving on to the next one. But there’s more work to be done if we are to create subjects and courses that are truly suited to this delivery model. In bringing traditional subject demarcations across, we risk isolating concepts, skills and knowledge.
- Resource collection: What is block teaching?
- ‘Why do we still timetable classes as if students don’t have lives outside university?’
- To block or not to block? How time affects learning in higher education
Under the semester model, students studying four subjects at a time might find links between units, which allows for inter-subject connections to be drawn among otherwise isolated ideas, knowledge and skills. That cross-pollination is more difficult to achieve on the block model, where units of study run consecutively rather than concurrently, resulting in what might be termed the sawtooth model, where students start from knowing nothing of a subject to knowing everything about it in four weeks, only to leave that knowledge untouched again.
A challenge for block practitioners is finding ways to turn this sawtooth into a ramp that allows students to ascend through their study journey, building knowledge and skills continually.
Perhaps a focus on process rather than content might facilitate this. Maybe we need to structure our courses around Bloom’s Taxonomy instead of content. Employers are increasingly calling for graduates who can function in the workplace as opposed to remember content. Could this be a way to deliver that?
No time for part-time?
The traditional part-time student who might do one subject over a 12- to 16-week semester is not well served by block scheduling. No block university has managed to provide a part-time student experience equivalent in workload and intensity to the traditional semester model.
Do block institutions simply say they don’t do part-time on the block? As a sector, we can’t afford to shut that door. Non-linear higher education will likely be the norm in the future. Students will need more flexibility to weave study into their lives. How do we make the block, so flexible in other ways, less rigid for part-timers?
The problem of assessment
Artificial intelligence is challenging the efficacy of traditional assessments such as essays, exams and multiple-choice-question tests, and the block model should also challenge these forms, despite its immersive nature, especially if we wish to graduate students who are employable.
The workplace does not isolate assessment from the process of daily work, as a test or essay does in the classroom. Instead, work and the product of that labour are part of a continuous process. Team leaders (managers or employers) are directly involved in that process, providing regular and ongoing criticism, guidance and feedback. Employee participation in that process, as much as the product itself, is what is assessed.
A block classroom in effect functions like a workplace engaged in a contained four- to seven-week problem-solving project. A team leader (the educator) and a workforce of creatives (the students) meet daily (or almost) to work together on assigned tasks.
How do we reinvent assessment such that it mirrors the process- and problem-solving-oriented nature of the workplace, allowing students to capitalise on the immersive, workplace-like nature of the block classroom?
The limitations of the semester structure
A block institution potentially has as many semesters in a year as it has blocks. At Victoria University, we run 10 blocks a year, but we have five entry points. Why can’t we have 10 entry points?* If we are determined to make higher education more flexible and accessible for students, then the easier we make it for them to join us, the better.
Does everything have to be block?
Institutions that adopt the block do so because they believe it offers a better experience for students, with the Quality Indicators of Learning and Teaching survey showing strong results for Victoria University in job skills, peer engagement and teaching quality. But if the student experience is truly front of mind, these institutions must ask themselves whether the block is right for all students in all situations.
The same questioning approach that took these institutions to the block must also be allowed to lead them away from the model when circumstances demand.
This is the only way we can allow the model, and our approach to it, to evolve. We cannot hang on to the block; we must hold it gently, ready to let it go if need be.
In search of a standard format (or what is the block?)
Finally, with so many versions of the block in operation – with variations in module length and delivery methods, for example – it becomes more difficult to say clearly what the block is. No two block implementations are the same, contextualised as they are to suit the conditions and needs of each institution.
But there must be core elements to the block that are present regardless of context or how the model is realised.
If we are going to report globally on the innovation and the ways we are transforming education, via the block model, then we need a common understanding of what we are reporting on. This wasn’t such an issue when there were only a handful of institutions implementing the model, but as the number of institutions grows, so too does the need for consistency and coherence as we continue to work out what the block is and where it is headed.
* I’m sure there are very good procedural reasons why we can’t offer more students more entry points, but there were also very good reasons why we shouldn’t go to block in the first place, and we worked through those.
John Weldon is associate dean of learning and teaching in the First Year College at Victoria University, Australia. He is co-editor (with Loretta Konjarski) of Block Teaching Essentials: A Practical Guide (Springer Nature, 2025).
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
comment