Evolutionary Curriculum Reconstruction

Process Model and Information System Development

Presentation Overview

• Context and Problems
• Proposed Process
  • Phase 1: Inception - Seed Proposals
  • Phase 2: Elaboration - Elaborate Proposals
  • Phase 3: Construction - Implementation-level Prototypes
  • Phase 4: Transition - Courses
• System Implementation
  • Curriculum management modules
  • Curriculum links visualization and editing
  • Quality assurance by curriculum mapping
• Conclusions and Future Work

Context

• 30% unemployment rate, so all who are able are working
• Each student has a guarantee by law that can remain and stay within the original enrolled program and rules for 8 years
• Flexibility at all Points
  • Ability to adjust workload (usually between 20-40 ECTS credits)
  • Ability to switch study programs towards new specializations
• Ever increasing freedom of choice, increased diversity
  • We have to guarantee that each student will have freedom to choose at least 50% of the courses from programs within the department
  • and at least 10% of the courses from other programs in the university

Problems

Too much going on to be able to understand without a structural approach

• Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering:
  • Curriculum revisions and sometimes even full reconstructions every few years: 2000, 2005, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2017
  • 16 active study programs with a variety of courses
  • 4000 students (IT + CS + SE + IS + CE)
  • Too many constraints and prerequisites
  • Many revisions of a single discipline are active in parallel
  • Each student can take courses from many revisions
  • Each teacher, in a single course - can have students from several active revisions of the material
• There are more than 30 organizational units in the University

Solution

• Accept the State of Perpetual Change
  • Curriculum reconstruction is not a one-off project to be finished as early as possible and continue living with it
  • Manage change requests
  • Be able to evolve
  • Enable and monitor the evolution
• Build-up Institutional-Wide Knowledge on Curricula Implementation Benefits and Problems from this Process

• Evolutionary Curriculum Reconstruction
  • A process that borrows some ideas from RUP and the agile Open/UP
  • Established and executed in a Spiral, Evolutionary Manner
  • SC (Stereeing Committee) manages the process

Process

Process

Phase 1: Inception
Seed Proposal

• Joint Vision: Discuss the most important issues in the existing study programs and agree on biggest problems.
• Environment preparation: Setup of templates, access-rights to the system, define roles in the system, establish of content repository of related materials.
• Program Inception: Short proposals are submitted on new study programs and/or reconstruction of existing ones.
• Curriculum Inception: Gathering of short proposals on new curricula or reconstruction of existing curricula.
• Curriculum Mapping: is established based on the short proposals as to the coverage of content in the proposals with respect to curricula guidelines and recommendations.

Phase 1: Inception ...
Seed Proposal ...

• Phase 1 Assessment: The discussions are analyzed and the mapping reports are investigated, producing a project status report. Each of the study program and curriculum proposals are tagged based on general opinion as „Acceptable“, „Minor issues“ or „Major issues“.
• Phase 1 Review: has tagged with status „Major issues“ are evaluated through a further discussion in which the proposers address the noted issues with specific arguments and offer possible fixes. At the end there is online voting if the fixes are accepted to be incorporated in the proposal. Items that are not accepted are dropped.

Phase 2: Elaboration
Elaborate Proposals

• Elaboration teams: For each of the proposals that were deemed acceptable for elaboration, teams are formed from participants that have interest to continue development.
• Environment preparation Templates, structures, access and administrative rights to the system, roles of users within the system, establishment of a content repository, revisions of Phase 1 proposals are activated.
• Program Elaboration: Detailed overview is written for each study program by volunteers from the respective team.

Phase 2: Elaboration ...
Elaborate Proposals ...

• Curriculum Elaboration:
  • Step 1: Detailed contents for each of the curricula are prepared by volunteers from the team (written from scratch, or based on former contents that are under reconstruction or renown curricula guidelines)
  • Step 2: Review discussion is open to all for all the contents.
  • Step 3: Revision of the content is performed based on the discussion. Curriculum mapping is refined based on the new contents. Inter-dependencies and prerequisites are defined for each curriculum.

Phase 2: Elaboration ...
Elaborate Proposals ...

• Debate: The elaborated contents and curriculum maps are frozen for discussion by participants from all the groups. Since the proposals have already received a pass in Phase 1, the discussion is focused towards checks on coverage.
• Phase 2 Assessment: Similar process as in Phase 1 Assessment except that the process allows several iterations, hence the additional status „Not finished“.
• Phase 2 Review: Similar to Phase 1 Review. The Items tagged with status „Major issues“ are evaluated thoroughly based on the documents and reviews. The proposers address the noted issues with arguments and offer fixes. Online voting at the end is used to decide which fixes will be incorporated.

Phase 3: Construction
Implementation-level Prototypes

• Construction Teams: Formed among participants that have interest to further develop the acceptable proposals from elaboration. Participation is voluntary.
• Environment preparation: Templates, structures, access and administrative rights to the system, roles of users within the system, establishment of a content repository, revisions of Phase 3 proposals are activated.

Phase 3: Construction ...
Implementation-level Prototypes ...

• Program Construction Step 1: Detailed description is written for each study program by volunteers from the teams, focusing on semester programming, layout of the curricula and inter-dependencies in order to create optimal programming that increase choice the students will have in each semester. Profiles and specialization tracks are clearly defined.
• Curriculum Construction Step 1: Detailed contents for each of the curricula are written: week-by-week topics are defined, reading materials are listed, decisions on plan of activities, learning methods, exam types and all requested details. The objectives and learning goals are mapped with respect to curriculum guidelines, preferably with a week-by-week curriculum mapping.

Phase 3: Construction ...
Implementation-level Prototypes ...

• Program Construction Step 2: Prerequisites receive special second focus, graphs of inter-dependencies are constructed and analyzed as a mandatory part of the process in order to investigate possible deadlocks, non-pass or delay-provoking constraints in the study program overall.
• Curriculum Construction Step 2: Revision of the contents is performed based on the program-level decisions. Curriculum mapping is refined based on the new contents.

Phase 3: Construction ...
Implementation-level Prototypes ...

• Debate: Final implementation level contents, graphs and maps are frozen and discussion is started by participants from all groups. The proposals already received a pass in Phase 2, so discussion focuses over newly added details, and prerequisites. Week-by-week program-level investigation is performed to detect possible overload - too many exams or assignments.
• Phase 3 Assessment: Similar process as in Phase 2 Assessment.
• Phase 3 Review: Similar process as in Phase 2 Review, except that no items are dropped in this phase. Those which are not approved will simply be subject of following iteration. Based on the results from the assessment reports, a decision is made by the SC if another iteration will be needed for Phase 3 or the project will continue.

Phase 4: Transition
Activate Courses

• Final version is prepared for accreditation materials by the SC and the respective process at the board is started. In case of issues reported by the accreditation board, an additional iteration from Phase 3 is needed. The cycle repeats.
• Versioning is frozen Once in production. But, access to discussions is given to all students for critique and review.
• Overview-level evaluation reports on the strengths and weaknesses of the study programs. SC asks for two complementary reports for each curriculum: report by the teachers that were involved, and reports by the teachers that were not involved.
• The reports are considered as an input in the following cycle.

Systems Support for the Process

The Main Use-case model

Curriculum management modules ...

The core of the architecture that defines the curriculum management system

Curriculum management modules ...

Editing curriculum definition as a proposal

Curriculum links visualization and editing

Real-time visualization of the graph of curriculum links.

Quality assurance by curriculum mapping

Course Curricula covering a specific topic from the BoK

Quality assurance by curriculum mapping

Heatmap indicating the coverage of a knowledge area in a program proposal

Conclusions and Future Work

The proposed process and system should not be considered a solution for every problem and issue, but instead as a framework towards solutions

The system is open-sourced and is made available from the ISISng project web-site https://develop.finki.ukim.mk/projects/isis, after each phase of the project.

Future developments are planned in several directions.

• towards a quality assurance and assessment model that measures the effects the structure of a study program and curricula have over learner success
• investigation on process-model proposals for accreditation boards that can enable the evolutionary process in a formal way

Questions and Comments?