This short presentation is intended to spark a discussion about the place of curriculum design within our institutions and the voices that count within it. We anticipate that it will be of particular interest to early or mid-career academics who are directly involved in curriculum design and would like to reflect on how their work may be perceived from a more strategic perspective. The presentation will also be relevant to leaders who are facing similar pressures within in their institutions and are keen to explore how self-reflexive curriculum design can become integrated into rapid institution-wide developments that are responsive to outside forces. Having focused on a single site within the first year of the project, we are keen to invite collaborators to join us in a wider research team in order to understand how curriculum design evolves as we emerge from the pandemic.
The structure will be as follows.
We will outline established models underlying curriculum design in Higher Education and list some challenges the institution studied has faced.
We will provide an overview of the intended project, its core questions and progress thus far.
The main body of the presentation will consider early findings of interview with: senior University managers, heads of school and student union representatives. It will outline several distinct perspectives of the role of academic-led curriculum design. These vary between a highly positive view of cross-pollination between high-quality academic input and an invigorated curriculum, to perceptions of the role of the student voice in ensuring relevance and marketability, to more circumspect perspectives on the role of academics and students in developing curricula and a focus on radical portfolio change or professional body accreditation.
Having initially focussed on the intersection of QA and Quality Enhancement, the study evolved in a changing context – as the QAA in Wales has adopted an enhancement approach thereby creating a continuum between QA and QE. As external pressures have intensified, these elements became increasingly understood in terms of traditional curriculum design which is some cases is seen to be in opposition to agile responses to technological innovation or regional economic needs, particularly in the case of re-training or micro-credit provision for CPD. The presentation will suggest ways in which they might come together and challenges in doing so!
In terms of innovation, a small body of work (primarily published between 2000-2010) studies the intersection of QA and QE (Quality Enhancement) mostly in terms of compliance and standardisation as opposed to innovation. We believe our study is innovative in terms of integrating QA/QE in terms of academic driven curriculum design (albeit using external peer review and student feedback). We hope to return to the conference next year with a larger sample and more developed findings.