Curriculum Development
Curriculum development includes a variety of activities around the creation of planned curriculum, pedagogy, instruction, and delivery methods for guiding student learning. Turn to Faculty Focus for tips and techniques.
May 2 - Each Academic Program Has a Part in Teaching Diversity
By: Rob Kelly in Curriculum Development
As the student body becomes increasingly diverse, it’s important to have faculty incorporate multicultural design into their courses regardless of discipline. Although it may not seem that all disciplines lend themselves to including multiculturalism as a learning goal, consider how Christine Stanley and Mathew Ouellett frame the issue.
January 31 - Capstone Courses Vary in Terms of Goals, Objectives, Structures and Assignments
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Curriculum Development
Capstone courses are now a requirement in many departments, programs, and college curricula. They vary across different dimensions, indicating that although their value is universally recognized, they share few common features. For starters, they are offered at various levels; at the department level for students in a particular major, at the college level, say, for students in engineering, and at the university level as a general education integrative experience.
August 7 - Making the Most of Fieldwork Learning Experiences
By: Glen T. Hvenegaard, PhD in Curriculum Development
Fieldwork refers to any component of the curriculum that involves leaving the classroom and learning through firsthand experience. Most instructors incorporate fieldwork to help students understand theory, develop skills, integrate knowledge, build tacit knowledge, develop meaning in places, and work with peers and instructors in alternate settings.
June 12 - Service-Learning Course Development
By: Rob Kelly in Curriculum Development
Service-learning courses offer a combination of academic content, service experience, and critical reflection. To make service-learning successful, consider the following recommendations from Barbara Jacoby, Faculty Associate for Leadership and Community Service-Learning at the University of Maryland, College Park.
August 30 - Eight Lessons about Student Learning and What They Mean for You
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Curriculum Development
A new edition of a classic book on the curriculum suggests eight lessons from the learning literature with implications for course and curriculum planning. Any list like this tends to simplify a lot of complicated research and offer generalizations that apply most, but certainly not all, of the time. Despite these caveats, lists like this are valuable. They give busy faculty a sense of the landscape and offer principles that can guide decision making, in this case about courses and curricula.
April 26 - How to Teach a Course That Leads to Certification
By: Vijay Bhuse, PhD in Curriculum Development
The Computer Information Sciences program at ECPI College of Technology offers job oriented, “hands-on” education required to meet the needs of an ever-changing and increasingly technical society. We encourage students not only to earn their degree but also to get certified in their respective fields. The great success we achieved in getting more than 50 students Comptia Security+ certified compelled us to share our experience.
April 19 - I Won’t Mess with Your Course if You Don’t Mess with Mine
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Curriculum Development, Instructional Design
There’s a tacit rule that most college teachers abide by: I won’t mess with your course if you agree not to mess with mine. Gerald Graff observes and asks, “This rules suits the teacher, but how well does it serve students?” (p. 155)
February 2 - Service-Learning: Tips for Aligning Pedagogies with Learning Outcomes
By: Magna Publications in Curriculum Development
While it is easy to see how service-learning meshes with courses in the social sciences, public health and education, can it work equally well in other areas, such as the hard sciences and the humanities?
Yes. While service-learning is not appropriate for every course, it can and does work well in every discipline. No matter the discipline, research has shown that service-learning helps students identify and examine the “big questions” and the social context in which the disciplines are situated.
November 29 - Curriculum Development, Alignment and Coordination: A Data-Driven Approach
By: Mary Bart in Curriculum Development
Most faculty work hard to make each individual course they teach the best learning experience it can be. They learn with each semester, and make revisions based on what worked and where the course stumbled. If done correctly, it’s a continuous improvement process that runs like a well-oiled machine. But no matter how good their individual courses are, it’s easy for faculty to end up in a silo–unsure of what’s happening in other courses throughout their discipline or department.
September 16 - Curricular Design Problems
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Curriculum Development, Teaching Professor Blog
Dan Klionsky makes some excellent points in a letter to the editor published in Cell Biology Education. He’s objecting to how departments design curricula. He’s writing about biology, but what concerns him doesn’t just happen in biology. “Curricular development … no longer involves rational and integrated course design. New courses are added based on faculty
