What is Curriculum Design?
The core activity of curriculum design occurs when disciplinary experts formulate a plan (a learning design pattern) specifying the teaching, learning and assessment activities that will be implemented in classes, modules, courses or programmes of study. The curriculum only becomes a reality, however, when teachers implement this learning design with real students in real classrooms.
A complex mix of institutional processes helps formalise and support curriculum design:
- external drivers, internal objectives and available resources all frame what curricula are provided
- processes and procedures within institutions determine the sequence of planning, documentation, approval and quality assurance of curricula
- stakeholders from different functional areas (e.g. registry, estates, IT services, academic office, departments, faculties and senate) co-ordinate the activities that support curriculum design and delivery.
The intention of the PiP project is to enhance both the core activity of learning design and the institutional processes associated with the development and implementation of learning designs.
Enhancing Learning Design: Principles in Patterns
Members of the PiP team will develop tools and techniques to support academic staff as they engage in learning design and will develop ways of recording, representing, sharing and reusing learning designs within and across disciplines.
The REAP project has already shown that powerful pedagogical ideas underpin effective learning designs. In REAP, it was assumed that the purpose of higher education was that students learn to manage and direct their own learning, to become self-regulated learners.
Based on this premise, a set of assessment and feedback principles was devised and implemented in 19 modules across three different higher education institutions. The re-designed modules resulted in improvements in student learning and confirmed the value of translating pedagogy into design principles. However, REAP did not fully explore ways of packaging and sharing the designs produced.
The PiP project will develop further the work started in REAP. It will identify ways of harnessing academic staff motivation to engage in design and re-design by developing designs that are not only pedagogically sound but that also address known bottlenecks to student learning in disciplines. Such bottlenecks might include concepts that are difficult to understand, skills that are hard to master or poor provision of feedback in classes with large numbers of students.
Enhancing Institutional Processes that support Curriculum Design
The PiP team will also develop new ways of supporting the associated processes that contextualise, guide and support curriculum design. This will involve mapping out the milestone steps from an idea for a new class through to its formalisation as part of the curriculum provision. These steps currently include decision-making processes (e.g. departmental, faculty and institutional approval), documentation production, resource allocation, estates consumption and timetabling. The intention is to identify all stakeholders involved in these support, validation and quality enhancement processes in order to determine workflow bottlenecks or gaps in documentation or barriers to communication across stakeholders.
From this map the PiP team will develop a range of enhanced processes, tools and technologies to support decision-making, to streamline procedures and processes, to address workflow bottlenecks and to enable new connections to be made between curriculum design and other organisational processes (e.g. the implications of design for estates consumption and technology requirements).
Project outputs
- A baseline map of the sequence of institutional processes and procedures that support decision-making and approval of curricula.
- A reworked map including a set of tools and associated guidance materials to support the streamlining and enhancement of institutional processes and procedures associated with curriculum design.
- A set of learning designs that address known teaching and learning issues of high relevance to academic staff in the disciplines.
- A set of tools and associated guidance materials to support the use of learning designs by academic staff in the disciplines.
- A website detailing progress during the lifespan of the project and as a dissemination point after the project close.
- An evaluation report detailing successes and lessons learned.
- Interim and final reports to JISC detailing lessons learned.
- Conference and other papers, presentations and other dissemination activities.