A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Curriculum design and development
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Interrogating practice
What is your conception of ‘the curriculum’? What models or frameworks do
you use when designing and developing courses or programmes for which
you have responsibility?
A LEARNING OUTCOMES APPROACH
TO CURRICULUM DESIGN
Most higher education institutions will within their mission statements give a sense of
institutional objectives and graduate attributes. In essence this is stating in generic terms
the intended learning outcomes for students pursuing courses and programmes at that
college or university.
These institutional claims should of course be reflected in and tracked through the
stated learning outcomes for specific disciplinary and interdisciplinary-based curricula.
The University of Auckland, for example, has a well-documented Graduate Profile. It
states that:
A student who has completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Auckland
will have acquired an education at an advanced level, including both specialist
knowledge and general intellectual and life skills that equip them for employment
and citizenship and lay the foundations for a lifetime of continuous learning and
personal development.
This statement is followed by the attributes it expects its graduates to have, categorised
under three headings (Table 4.1).
The Graduate Profile lays out explicitly the shared expectations for student learning
at both the institutional and the programme levels. The Profile is therefore a guiding
document for more specific disciplinary-based learning outcome statements and
curriculum design. The role of academics within faculties, schools and departments is to
design the curriculum, the teaching methods and strategies, the pedagogy and the
educational opportunities that intentionally promote these shared expectations (Maki,
2004). Most universities have or are developing a Graduate Profile or statements of
Graduate Attributes.
A learning outcomes approach to curriculum development is still relatively new and
many academics initially find it difficult to express learning outcomes in a manner that
is meaningful to both staff and students. The next section of this chapter will address this
issue.