Learning & Teaching

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.

The Future Skills Taxonomy and the Learning Through Assessment Framework

The University’s Future Skills Taxonomy and Learning Through Assessment Framework are institutional frameworks that every credit-bearing course is expected to use. Your PIP Annex Section 6 evidences how your course aligns with both: two to four skills from the Skills Taxonomy, traceable from your ILOs through learning activities to assessment and student-facing recognition, and a paragraph on LTA alignment.

In addition, 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. 

All C4L courses should: 

• Explicitly reference their chosen C4L characteristic within the aims of the course. 

• Course proposals must make clear how this characteristic is developed through teaching, learning, and assessment on a course through the aims and choice of methods of assessment.

While the selected characteristic does not require to be explicitly mentioned in the ILOs, we expect to see how the characteristic influenced the choice of assessment methods. The characteristics will be developed through student engagement with those aims and the broader pedagogical approaches involved in teaching, content and assessment. 

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.

You can find out more about C4L charactertistics and eligibility on the SharePoint page.

In the Academic Year 2026/2027, C4L courses are available to: 

• Year 2 undergraduate students in the College of Arts & Humanities 

• Year 2 MA Social Science students 

• Year 1 and 2 BSc/MSci students in the College of Science & Engineering 

• Year 1 and 2 BSc Psychology and Life Science students in the College of Medical, Veterinary, and Life Sciences 

C4L courses are also available to Visiting Students on the above programmes at the University.

We expect eligibility to remain the same but it may expand in the future to include more undergraduate students.

No, 

1. Redeveloped courses - Existing courses that are closely aligned to C4L principles and could, with some redevelopment, meet C4L criteria 

2. New Courses - New courses that develop research-informed and transferable capabilities relevant across disciplinary boundaries.

3. Interdisciplinary courses - Courses that demonstrate genuine integration of disciplinary perspectives, methodologies and approaches to create new ways of understanding complex issues

Your College C4L Lead can work with you to align an existing course to C4L charactaersitics and eligibility.

Since 2024, the C4L team has been working with colleagues across the University, including The Hunterian, to explore how interdisciplinary approaches can be embedded meaningfully within learning and teaching.

Building on this work, we are inviting colleagues to propose new interdisciplinary courses that bring together expertise, methodologies and perspectives from multiple disciplines to explore questions and challenges that cannot be addressed through a single disciplinary lens.

These courses should embody the principles of Curriculum for Life by creating opportunities for students from different disciplinary backgrounds to learn collaboratively and develop as global citizens, creative leaders, change makers and social innovators.

What Do We Mean by Interdisciplinary?

For this call, interdisciplinarity means more than bringing together content from different subjects.

Successful proposals should demonstrate genuine integration of disciplinary perspectives, methodologies and approaches to create new ways of understanding complex issues.

We are particularly interested in proposals that:

• Bring together colleagues from two or more disciplines, Schools or Colleges.

• Integrate different forms of evidence, enquiry and problem-solving.

• Address significant societal, cultural, scientific or technological challenges.

• Enable students to engage with multiple perspectives and ways of knowing.

• Create learning experiences that would not be possible within a single discipline.

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.