Comparing Bachelor Curriculum Innovations – Phase II
“If you want to do something complex, you need to keep it simple!”
In the second phase of our Bachelor Curriculum Innovation comparison we looked at what is happening with the goals, guidelines and procedures for curriculum change in the practice of the 3 TU’s. Ideas that come up in dialogue and get written down in reports, find their way into the organisation and start a new life. It is always a question what is retained of the original intentions behind the ideas when teachers who were not part of the dialogue nor involved in writing the reports, start reading, interpreting and applying these ideas to their teaching practice.
In this project we spoke to teachers, policy officers and managers of two programmes, Architecture and Electrical Engineering, about how they went about with ‘their’ curriculum change, in terms of organisation and of curriculum design. Based on literature on curriculum change we developed a heuristic that served as the basis for our interviews and the analysis.
Every phase of this project was fascinating: the fact that we could ask our colleagues to reconstruct their experiences with the processes, decisions and dilemmas they faced, but also combining these different viewpoints into an analysis that sheds a new light on the forces that were at play. From the interviews we know that the conditions under which the work had to be done could be very different, even within a university and that the human factor should never be discounted in processes like these. In the final phase we are surprised to find how different and similar the discussions in the programmes at our 3 TU’s have been. It is striking how some seemingly cosmetic differences have had incredible impact, and how complex issues can be solved with simple solutions.
A great example is Architecture in Delft. Their curriculum redesign was radical: all courses were replaced with multidisciplinary modules, even the exams are multidisciplinary! The entire bachelor programme was overhauled in a single year. Most things have gone smoothly, and this can be attributed to multiple causes. Early on, a powerful visual on the envisioned programme was developed and this discussions a lot easier because the message was clear to everyone. Another cause of success has to do with the university teaching qualification. Most teachers were working towards this qualification and they could use their work on the new modules to fulfil the requirements. All teachers received much feedback from an education specialist and from their peers and everyone knew what their peers were working on. Alignment and coordination between modules suddenly was a piece of cake! The head of the faculty’s Education Office summarised it as follows: “If you want to do something complex, you need to keep it simple!”
I am curious what we will find as we are combining and exploring the data of 6 programmes. Slowly we are getting data on the retention rates and they look promising. The journey to get there is at least as interesting!
Maartje van den Boogaard
Educational Advisor at ICLON