ABSTRACT

The curriculum is a live issue in universities across the world. Many stakeholders – governments, employers, professional and disciplinary groups and parents – express strong and often conflicting views about what higher education should achieve for its students.

Many universities are reviewing their curricula at an institutional level, aware that they are in a competitive climate in which league tables encourage students to see themselves as consumers and the university as a product, or even a ‘brand’. The move has prompted renewed concern for some central educational questions, about both what is learnt and how.

Strategic Curriculum Change explores the ways in which major universities across the world are reviewing their approaches to teaching and learning. It unites institution-level strategy with the underlying educational issues. The book is grounded in a major study of curriculum change in over twenty internationally-focused, research-intensive universities in the UK, US, Australia, The Netherlands, South Africa and Hong Kong. Chapters include:

 

  • Achieving curriculum coherence: Curriculum design and delivery as social practice
  • Assessment in curriculum change
  • The whole-of-institution curriculum renewal undertaken by the University of Melbourne, 2005-2011
  • The physical and virtual environment for learning
  • People and change: Academic work and leadership

 

This book presents a theorised and contextualised approach to the study of the curriculum, and carries on much-needed research on the curriculum in higher education. It is an essential for the collection of all academics at university level, and those involved in policy making, quality assurance and enhancement.

part |40 pages

Curriculum coherence

chapter |13 pages

Achieving curriculum coherence

Curriculum design and delivery as social practice

chapter |7 pages

Case study: A tradition of reform

The curriculum at Brown University

part |68 pages

Strategic curriculum structures and processes

chapter |11 pages

Transforming student learning

Undergraduate curriculum reform at the University of Hong Kong 1

chapter |19 pages

Shaping the curriculum

A characteristics approach

part |51 pages

Enabling strategic change

chapter |17 pages

Change

Processes and resources

chapter |17 pages

People and change

Academic work and leadership

chapter |15 pages

Case study

The whole-of-institution curriculum renewal undertaken by the University of Melbourne, 2005–2011

part |52 pages

The networked curriculum

chapter |14 pages

Case study

Curriculum structure as a key variable affecting performance in higher education: The case of South Africa