Mercurius Politicus has designed all its programs mapping onto Qualifications Credit Framework (QCF) and keeping in view of suitability for continuing recognition, establishment in the EU or the EFTA, safeguards on change of control, sourcing resources and securing arrangements, identification and management of risk, managing conflicts of interest and incidents, and addressing to issues such as academic malpractice and maladministration.
Mercurius Politicus’s curriculum development committee is consciously making it more adaptable to situated learning model, as initially conceived by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger as a model of learning in a community of practice. Lave and Wenger affirm that learning should not be viewed as simply the transmission of abstract and decontextualised knowledge from one individual to another, but a social process whereby knowledge is co-constructed; they suggest that such learning is situated in a specific context and embedded within a particular social and physical environment. This type of learning allows an individual (students/learner) to learn by socialization, visualization, and imitation. Learning begins with people trying to solve problems. When learning is problem based, people explore real life situations to find answers, or to solve the problems. Hung’s study focuses on how important being social is to learning. In believing that learning is social, Hung adds that learners who gravitate to communities with shared interests tend to benefit from the knowledge of those who are more knowledgeable than they are. He also says that these social experiences provide people with authentic experiences. When students are in these real-life situations they are compelled to learn. Hung concludes that taking a problem-based learning approach to designing curriculum carries students to a higher level of thinking.
As Mercurius Politicus’ other vertical which continuously develop multiple centres of UK and European Qualifications through Blended learning, hence, Mercurius Politicus’s continuous effort has been to marry off situated learning to ‘blended learning’ like pedagogy. Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path or pace. While still attending a “brick-and-mortar” school structure, face-to-face classroom methods are combined with computer-mediated activities. Proponents of blending learning cite the opportunity for data collection and customization of instruction and assessment as two major benefits of this approach.
Mercurius Politicus believes in Constructivism (a form of epistemology) that argues that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas. During infancy, it was an interaction between human experiences and their reflexes or behavior-patterns. Jean Piaget called these systems of knowledge schemata. Constructivism is not a specific pedagogy, although it is often confused with constructionism, an educational theory developed by Seymour Papert, inspired by constructivist and experiential learning ideas of Piaget. Piaget’s theory of constructivist learning has had wide ranging impact on learning theories and teaching methods in education and is an underlying theme of many education reform movements. Research support for constructivist teaching techniques has been mixed, with some research supporting these techniques and other research contradicting those results.