Curriculum Design

Curriculum Design

1. Objectives

   • Appreciate the complexity of curriculum design and the importance of a systematic process in such development.
   • Respond appropriately to demands placed on you, in the future, to undertake the process of course design or revision.
   • Evaluate the ways in which your own and other's lessons are embedded in the overall goals of a curriculum, and assess the effectiveness of lessons in that larger context.

2. Curriculum development: An overview

   • It is important to ask questions yourself in order to start designing a curriculum.
     • Situation analysis: Steps
       • 1._ Educational setting.
       • 2._ Class Characteristics.
       • 3._ Faculty characteristics.
       • 4._ Governance of course content.
       • 5._ Assesment and evaluation requirements.

3. Needs Analysis

   • It is important to point out that needs is not an easy concept to define, they are "wants, desires, demands, expectations, motivations, lack, constraints, and requirements.
     • Objective needs
       • They are those that can be relatively easily measured, quantified, or specified with agreement.
     • Subjective needs
       • They are often of equal greater importance as they focus on needs as seen through the eyes of the learners themselves.

4. Problematizing

   • Graves says that it is very important to take into consideration a large number of things that can go wrong, so it would easy to be prepared to face them.

5. Specifying goals

   • Goals are rather broadly based aims and purposes in an educational context; objectives are more specific than goals.

6. Assesment

   • Assessments of the students may be offered in a wide array of possible formats such as quizzes, multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blank tests, and others.

7. Program evaluation

   • Any curriculum should be considered complete without a program evaluation. It must have an evaluation for the teacher and an evaluation of the program itself.

8. Topics for discussion, action, and research.

   • It is important to keep in mind individual activities, group or pair activities and whole-class discussion.