Curriculum for Life
What is Curriculum for Life?
C4L courses are credit-bearing, elective modules designed to help students engage meaningfully with learning, knowledge, and ways of thinking and practicing beyond their core disciplines. Aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), these courses focus on real-world challenges, foster future-ready skills, and encourage collaboration across subjects, Schools, and degree programmes, providing students with opportunities to develop themselves as global citizens, creative leaders, change makers and social innovators.
In the Academic Year 2025/2026, C4L courses will be available to Year 2 undergraduate students in the College of Arts & Humanities, Year 2 MA Social Science students and Year 2 students on select College of Science & Engineering and BSc programmes (including Psychology). Except for CiP, Curriculum for Life courses are also available to Visiting Students at the University.
They are a level 1 credit option, and each course is worth 10 or 20 credits and is compatible with progressing to a student's preferred Honours combination.
Find out more about Curriculum for Life with this video featuring Professor Maureen Bain, Assistant Vice-Principal (Curriculum), and Professor Jo Edson Ferrie, Professor of Sociology.
How can I get involved?
As part of the Learning and Teaching Strategy we are excited to invite you to be part of an innovative journey to transform the educational experience of students at the University of Glasgow.
We are now seeking Expressions of Interest from colleagues who are passionate about teaching and innovation to develop new C4L courses for the Academic Year 2026/2027. You may propose a new course, adapt existing materials (e.g. SFC-funded microcredentials), or reimagine current Honours or Masters-level courses for a pre-honours audience.
You can find out more about the process and submit your Expression of Interest here. Check out the Frequently Asked Questions below.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is my College C4L Lead?
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Medicine, Veterinary & Life Sciences |
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College of Science & Engineering |
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College of Social Sciences |
What makes C4L Courses Distinct?
The suite of courses being developed under the banner of Curriculum for Life (C4L) are credit bearing courses (SCQA level 7 or 8) that sit alongside our core disciplines and programmes but are designed to provide enriching opportunities that enable students to:
- Engage with societal challenges, foster creativity and problem-solving, and develop essential skills for the future.
- Actively participate in experiential learning as well as structured classroom environments.
- Experience learning beyond their chosen discipline, fostering lifelong development.
What C4L Courses are running in AY 2025/2026?
You can explore each of the six C4L courses running in AY 2025/2026 via the student webpages:
Collaborations in Practice (CIP). EDUC1138.
Measuring your social world. SSPS1001 QM1.
Does Scotland need human rights? Mobilising for change with civil society. SPS1010.
Applied Data Skills. PSYCH1012.
Making sense of problem substance use in Scotland. MED1020.
Intercultural Literacies. LIBARTS1002.
How can I get involved in developing a C4L Course for AY 2026/27?
If you're interested in contributing to the development of a C4L course for the 2026/27 academic year, please speak to your College C4L lead and submit an Expressions of Interest following the guidelines here.
What is required for my course to qualify as a C4L course?
All C4L courses are unified by programmatic aims and outcomes. To qualify as a C4L course, a course must align to the IDEA framework:
- Interact across disciplines to find solutions to societal challenges
- Disrupt ways of learning and knowing
- Enhance awareness of self, community and positionality
- Apply learning to confront societal challenges
C4L courses should not be introductory disciplinary courses adapted for a broader student body (e.g. statistics 101 for social scientists) but should start with a societal issue/challenge and encourage students to use their (to date) disciplinary learning and skills, working with students from other colleges to arrive at interdisciplinary solutions.
C4L courses are SCQA level 7 or level 8 and typically are 20 credits but can be 10 credit courses.
C4L courses encourage innovation in assessments. Exams are not permitted, and essays are only permitted if shown to be the best pedagogical fit. If your abstract is chosen to progress to Stage 2 (Course pitch) we will offer you support with assessment design.
C4L Characteristics and Student Futures Skills:
The C4L team has carefully considered the challenges of engaging students in new forms of action-oriented pedagogy. In collaboration with the Student Skills and Futures workstream, we have embedded C4L characteristics into course design to support students in recognising and reflecting on their own transformation.
Each C4L course is designed to strengthen one or more of these characteristics:
- Change-Maker: Driving solutions to sustainable futures; approaching wicked problems with curiosity; healthy and equitable futures through collaborative leadership.
- Creative Leader: Using evidence-based arguments to inspire others and drive collaborative action; be able to overcome and learn from setbacks and succeed in a variety of settings; have the confidence to generate and introduce ideas, products, and approaches.
- Global Citizen: Convey complex ideas strategically to other social actors and institutions; empathy and respect across communities; cooperate with and across diverse communities.
- Social Innovator: Building service and sustain meaningful partnerships; fostering new ways of thinking; challenging power and privilege to aid inclusion and belonging.
This approach ensures that students not only gain practical competencies but also develop a strong sense of personal and academic growth throughout their C4L journey , anchoring their development in work-ready skills and reinforcing their identity as University of Glasgow students.
Which students will be able to take a C4L Course in AY26/27?
In Academic Year 2026/27, our goal is to offer pre-honours undergraduate students across all four colleges the opportunity to take a C4L course as an elective. While participation may vary depending on programme structures and availability, this approach aims to broaden access and allow students from a wide range of disciplines to benefit from the transformative, action-oriented learning that C4L courses provide.
Do C4L courses need to be entirely new?
Not necessarily. While some pilot C4L courses—such as Collaborations in Practice (CIP)—have been newly developed, others have been redeveloped to align with the programmatic aims of C4L.
For example, Advanced Data Skills was originally a 10-credit micro-credential and has been transformed into a 20-credit in-person course.
(Include Applied Data Skills example?)
What do we mean when we say C4L courses are ‘interdisciplinary’?
For C4L the concept of interdisciplinarity can be understood in multiple ways:
- It may involve forging connections across different disciplines, encouraging collaboration and integration of diverse perspectives.
- It can also suggest the creation of an undisciplined space—a zone that exists in the interstices between disciplines, where conventional boundaries are blurred.
- In some cases, it may even aim to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether, fostering entirely new ways of thinking and learning.
As Moran (2010) notes:
“The value of the term ‘interdisciplinary’ lies in its flexibility and indeterminacy, and that there are potentially as many forms of interdisciplinarity as there are disciplines.”
— Moran, J. (2010). Interdisciplinarity. Oxon: Routledge, p.14.
For C4L courses does the teaching delivery team need to be interdisciplinary?
While students taking C4L elective courses are likely to come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, the teaching team does not necessarily need to be interdisciplinary. However, it can be, and in some cases, this may enhance the learning experience.
An example of a C4L course that successfully applies an interdisciplinary teaching approach is Collaborations in Practice, where diverse academic perspectives come together to create a richer, more integrated learning experience.
If you're unsure whether an interdisciplinary teaching team is appropriate for your course, your C4L College Lead will be able to offer further guidance. You can find details of this here.