Curriculum Design & Suggestions

Curriculum:

Curriculum is the heart of a student’s college or advanced learning experience. Curriculum is a college or university’s primary means of guiding student’s directions. Curricula should be reviewed and revised on a regular basis, better to serve the changing needs of both students and society. We are often urged to reassess the quality of our curricula. Faculties are responding to this challenge by turning their attention to long neglected issues. They are doing so as a practical means of both attracting and retaining more students, ensuring their success, and producing high quality, fair outcomes for everyone.
The curriculum is an “academic plan,” which should include: the purpose of the curriculum (i.e., goals for student learning), content, sequence (the order of the learning experience), instructional methods, instructional resources, evaluation approaches, and how adjustments to the plan will be made based on experience or assessment data.

Goals & Objectives

Goals and objectives are the general intended purposes and desired achievements of a particular educational environment. Crucially, they provide a framework for assessing the effectiveness of a curriculum. Goals and objectives generally characterize three types of learning: knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

Outcomes & Competencies

Learning outcomes and competencies describe specific measurable skills, knowledge or attitudes that learners will have achieved through the education program. The term “outcome” is usually used to describe the level of proficiency that a graduate should be expected to demonstrate, while “competencies” is typically used to describe a level of proficiency needed by a beginning professional in the field.

Curriculum Map or Matrix

When developing or revising a curriculum, curriculum maps or matrices can help educators concretely describe the sequence of courses/content and more easily conceptualize how different pieces of the curriculum work together as a whole. They can also identify gaps in a curriculum or a need to re-think course sequencing.

Purposes and goals

A curricular mission statement and written curricular goals (intended student development outcomes or intended results) articulate curricular purpose – what graduates should know and be able to do and those attitudes and values a faculty believes are appropriate to well-educated men and women. These goals and their objectives are specified in considerable detail and in behavioral language that will permit assessment of their degree of achievement (the curriculum’s actual outcomes).

Process

Student activities are chosen that are capable of developing the desired outcomes, as indicated by empirical research. Curriculum has its desired effect primarily through instruction. Therefore, the choice of course experiences and the specific quality and efficacy of these experiences in producing the stated intended outcomes for all students is fundamental to the quality of any curriculum. Current empirically based education theory is essential to effective instruction and thus the improvement of curricular quality. For example, there is little evidence that using traditional lectures will develop in students the higher-order cognitive abilities a faculty may value.

Academic Advising

An effective curriculum – one that produces the results it claims in all of a college’s diverse students – depends for its success upon a high-quality program of academic advising. Modern academic advising is developmental, starting with each student’s values and goals, and helps all students design curricular and non-curricular experiences that can help them achieve their own goals and the institution’s intended learning outcomes.

Edutechversity’s Services for Curriculum Design

Edutechversity’s staff work with groups of faculties in departments or schools/colleges to review their current curricula, develop new curricular offerings, and evaluate the results of curricular changes.
Edutechversity’s staff consult on topics such as the development of measurable outcomes or curriculum mapping.
Edutechversity also assist with retreat planning, for the purposes of curriculum alignment or preparation for assessment team visits.

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