HE-C01 — Curriculum Design and Development

Course Code: HE-C01  |  School: School of Higher Education  |  Cluster: Level 2 — Curriculum and Teaching Practice

Level: Intermediate  |  Duration: 6 weeks · 24–30 learning hours  |  Language: English  |  Certificate: Professional Certificate (non-degree)  |  Format: Self-paced with AI support under human supervision

Overview

Curriculum is the most consequential and least examined artefact a university produces. A degree programme encodes a theory of what a graduate should be able to do, a sequence of intellectual development, and a distribution of institutional resources — and most programmes acquired their present shape through accretion rather than design.

This course treats curriculum design as a discipline with its own methods and evidence. It covers programme-level outcome specification, the mapping of outcomes across modules so that capability is built rather than assumed, the sequencing of difficulty and the identification of threshold concepts, the integration of assessment across a programme rather than within isolated units, and the negotiation of stakeholder demands from professional bodies, employers, students and regulators.

The orientation is toward whole programmes rather than single modules, because most curriculum failures are failures of coherence: outcomes that no module actually develops, capabilities assessed once and never revisited, and prerequisite chains that no longer correspond to content. Learners produce a complete redesign of a real programme, with a curriculum map, an assessment strategy and an implementation sequence.

Learning outcomes

On completion, a successful learner will be able to:

1. Specify programme-level learning outcomes that describe graduate capability and can be evidenced across a sequence of modules.
2. Construct a curriculum map linking every programme outcome to the modules that develop, practise and assess it, and identify gaps and redundancy.
3. Sequence content and capability using threshold concepts and evidence about the development of expertise.
4. Design a programme-level assessment strategy that distributes cognitive demand appropriately and avoids duplication and bunching.
5. Integrate professional, regulatory and accreditation requirements without allowing compliance to determine the intellectual structure of the programme.
6. Consult stakeholders — students, alumni, employers, professional bodies — and translate their input into design decisions without capitulating to any single interest.
7. Produce a complete programme redesign with map, assessment strategy, resource implications and a realistic implementation sequence.

Who this course is for

The course is intended for programme directors and curriculum leads, deans and heads of department, academic developers, quality assurance staff, and academics serving on curriculum committees. It is also valuable for staff of new institutions or new programmes designing from a blank sheet, and for professional body representatives who set curriculum requirements.

Prerequisites

Completion of HE-F03 or equivalent teaching experience. Learners must have access to a real programme — existing or proposed — including its outcomes, module descriptors and assessment schedule, since all assessed work concerns that programme.

Syllabus

Module 1 — What a curriculum is and what it encodes

The module opens by distinguishing the intended, the enacted and the experienced curriculum, and the hidden curriculum that transmits professional norms without being taught. It examines competing organising logics — disciplinary, competency-based, problem-based, liberal — and the assumptions each makes about knowledge and graduate identity.

Lessons. 1.1 Intended, enacted, experienced and hidden. 1.2 Organising logics and their assumptions. 1.3 Graduate attributes and their translation into content. 1.4 Auditing an existing programme’s implicit theory.

Deliverable. Diagnostic note (800 words) reconstructing the implicit theory of one real programme.

Module 2 — Programme outcomes and curriculum mapping

This module builds the central artefact. It covers writing outcomes at programme level, distinguishing introduce, develop and master stages, constructing a map across all modules, and reading the map diagnostically for outcomes that are never developed, capabilities assessed only once, and modules that carry no programme outcome at all.

Lessons. 2.1 Programme outcomes versus module outcomes. 2.2 Introduce, develop, master. 2.3 Building the map. 2.4 Reading the map for gaps and redundancy.

Deliverable. Analytical brief (1,000 words): a completed curriculum map with diagnostic commentary.

Module 3 — Sequencing, thresholds and progression

The module addresses order. It covers threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, the development of expertise and the role of deliberate practice, spiral curriculum design, prerequisite structures and their frequent obsolescence, and the management of cohorts with heterogeneous preparation.

Lessons. 3.1 Threshold concepts and liminality. 3.2 Expertise development and deliberate practice. 3.3 Spiral design and revisiting. 3.4 Prerequisites, pathways and flexibility.

Deliverable. Design artefact: a redesigned programme structure with justified sequencing.

Module 4 — Programme-level assessment strategy

This module lifts assessment from the module to the programme. It covers the distribution of assessment load across a year, the avoidance of duplication and deadline bunching, the design of capstone and integrative tasks, programmatic assessment approaches, and the evidencing of programme outcomes that no single module can demonstrate.

Lessons. 4.1 Mapping assessment against outcomes. 4.2 Load distribution and bunching. 4.3 Integrative and capstone design. 4.4 Programmatic assessment models.

Deliverable. Evaluation report (1,000 words) auditing an existing programme’s assessment distribution.

Module 5 — Requirements, stakeholders and constraint

The module addresses the external environment: professional body and accreditation requirements, regulatory credit and workload rules, employer input and its limits, student voice, and alumni evidence. It teaches the translation of requirements into design decisions rather than the mechanical insertion of required content.

Lessons. 5.1 Accreditation requirements as design input. 5.2 Employer engagement and its limits. 5.3 Student and alumni evidence. 5.4 Negotiating conflicting demands.

Deliverable. Implementation plan (1,000 words) reconciling one set of conflicting requirements.

Module 6 — Implementing and sustaining curriculum change

The final module addresses delivery. It covers governance and approval processes, staff workload and capability implications, resource and timetable consequences, teach-out arrangements for students on the old programme, and the monitoring arrangements that determine whether the redesign actually worked.

Lessons. 6.1 Approval processes and how to navigate them. 6.2 Workload, capability and staff development. 6.3 Transition and teach-out. 6.4 Monitoring the redesign.

Deliverable. Final capstone: complete programme redesign (3,000 words) with map, strategy and sequence.

Assessment

Pass mark 70 per cent. All assessed components must be attempted. Every mark in this course is issued by a human assessor; no assessment outcome is generated automatically.

Rubric criteria

Each assessed artefact is marked against four criteria at four levels (distinction, pass with merit, pass, fail).

1. Coherence. Whether the programme has a defensible intellectual structure in which outcomes, sequence and assessment reinforce one another.
2. Mapping rigour. Whether the curriculum map is complete and accurate, and whether gaps and redundancies are identified and addressed rather than smoothed over.
3. Stakeholder judgement. Whether external requirements are integrated intelligently rather than bolted on, and whether competing demands are reconciled with a stated rationale.
4. Implementability. Whether the redesign accounts for staffing, workload, timetable, approval and transition, and whether the sequence is realistic.

Reading list

Core. John Biggs & Catherine Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 4th edition (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2011).

Jan H. F. Meyer & Ray Land, ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge’, Higher Education, 49:3 (2005), pp. 373–388.

L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences, revised edition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013).

Cees P. M. van der Vleuten et al., ‘A Model for Programmatic Assessment Fit for Purpose’, Medical Teacher, 34:3 (2012), pp. 205–214.

Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, expanded 2nd edition (Alexandria: ASCD, 2005).

European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) (Brussels: ENQA, 2015).

Academic integrity and use of AI

AI tools may be used in this course for locating literature, organising evidence, drafting non-analytical sections and criticising the learner’s own work. They may not be used to generate the analysis, the evaluation or the recommendation. Every submission carries a use-of-AI statement naming the tools used and the purpose of each use.

All citations must be verified against the primary source, and institutional facts — regulations, standards, accreditation criteria, published data — must be cited to the issuing body. Fabricated references and invented statistics result in failure and referral. Where learners write about their own institution they must not disclose confidential personnel or student data, and illustrative cases must be anonymised.