What is curriculum design?
Curriculum design touches every aspect of a university’s business, from aligning its portfolio of courses to its mission, through market research and course development to quality assurance and enhancement, resource allocation, timetabling, recruitment and assessment. In this sense the curriculum lifecycle is very like the lifecycle for any other type of product development. The product is the curriculum that will meet the needs of the economy and society and keep the UK a global leader in research.
The curriculum also encompasses the practice of educational design, based on sound understanding of how people learn and how they develop as capable individuals with different subject specialisms. Learning transforms life chances, and the relationship learners have to the curriculum is not simply as consumers of educational product. Accreditation remains an important goal of higher education, but a curriculum for the 21st century must also inspire a lifelong capacity to learn. This means changing not only what is learned at university, but how it is learned, so that learners become co-creators of knowledge and collaborators in networks of research and professional practice.
The JISC Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design programme is exploring how technology can help address particular design challenges and so provide benefits for institutions, learners, employers, professional bodies and the wider community. This programme of 12 projects led by teams in UK universities will run until 2012. It has run in parallel with the Curriculum Delivery programme which has focused on how learners interact with the designed curriculum.
Why change the way we develop the curriculum?
The current reform of the sector brings both business processes and the learning experience sharply into focus. Financial constraints demand efficiencies that are not easy to achieve when dealing with interconnected systems and processes and pedagogic practice must fit new cost models and modes of study to deliver quality learning for 21st century needs. The projects in the programme are an integral part of institution-wide change initiatives transforming strategy and policy, culture and practice. They are seeking solutions to sector and institutional challenges including:
Technology plays a vital part in addressing these issues. Not only can it help us improve organisational efficiency in an administrative sense, it can also help provide learners with the information they need to make informed choices, give them more choice in their own learning pathways and a voice in collaborative or negotiated design of the curriculum as well as provide professionals with learner related information to support personal learning needs.
See Managing Curriculum Change (2009) and Transforming curriculum design: transforming institutions (2011) for overviews of programme developments.
Exploring project resources in the Design Studio
All project resources and outputs are contextualised within the Design Studio. You can:
You can also browse all funded projects on the home pages of the JISC Curriculum Design and Curriculum Delivery programmes.
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