One of the greatest management problems in higher education is resource planning, as they lack resources to align the curriculum and the syllabus with the graduate profile of a given institution. That is, skill based integrated planning. Universities tend to spend months coordinating and negotiating how is a broad set of skills that should be developed throughout the entire learning experience.

Higher education institutions normally lack digital solutions that allow them to verify if the graduate profile is aligned with the specific development of skills they need to achieve. “Generally, all institutions define how students will leave college regarding their expected capacities and how they are expressed in terms of skills, developed at the time they leave school”, according to Cristián Espinoza, Head of I & D, U-Planner. The challenge, according to the expert, is “how do we transform different students with various levels of academic preparation, so that all arrive to this graduate profile expected by the labor market and is indeed the level we promised the student.”

Case

Let’s imagine a prestigious School of Engineering. The BSc in Industrial Engineering, in concordance with labor market officials, reformed their curriculum and developed a new graduate profile - a set of characterizations and skills of a professional from that institution. This:

• - Integrates 7 skills, competences, attribtues or content objectives, throughout the entire major, develop gradually in up to 5 levels.
• - Includes higher level skills, such as socialized specific knowledge of their discipline, independent use of time and project management.

In theory, the institution was confident that college students were leaving college with this set of skills, however, in the first report from internship supervisors, many employers criticized attitude problems and lack of independence from graduates, especially in terms of time management and project development.

The School of Engineering took several months figuring out an integrated planning process, revising exhaustively and in comparative basis, both the graduate profile, the curriculum and the syllabus. It finally detected that, in fact, they were not living up to the graduate profile: the development of certain skills was taken for granted.

• - From 44 subjects, none had in their syllabus the development of higher levels self-management and teamwork skills.
• - Fourth-year syllabus concentrated the development of specific knowledge of their discipline: 15 different classes worked the same skills, making these at times redundant.

In these cases, according to Mr. Espinoza, “there is no subject linked to those skill levels. We are expecting students to accomplish that level of expertise, but at no time, we are leading to complete it”. To the expert, a concentration of courses with a certain number of skill sets is not necessarily a bad thing, “but it can be generating an unbalance (...), we are forcing the students to make a great effort for individual skills while leaving behind others”.

Aligning the curriculum and the graduate profile in higher education

One of the main issues is integrated planning, as they lack specific software solutions. “This is extremely complicated to do when the process is done through emails and an Excel spreadsheet, a million of them, where each spreadsheet is one single course,” he says. The expert underlines that if “the complete information fails to be in the same place.”

Espinoza concludes that, in order to better align the curriculum, it’s important to incorporate management techniques “that coordinate and facilitate internal debate in a higher education institution”. “For instance, if the academic community has a conversation on whether or not students dedicate a lot of time in foundation sciences or integrate a more holistic vision, this discussion will be carried out with the evidence provided by this dashboard”, he states.

For this reason, U-Planner is beginning a series of webinars to provide orientations to the academic community in elements such as technological innovations, curriculum design and learning outcomes”, with technologies developed with the University of Sydney.

“What we are doing”, he says, "is support universities in the transformation the joint effort of perfecting and creating a continuous improvement process, taking into consideration what is going on, the lifetime of students and their development individually and as groups, to improve continuously each and every one of the programs and the way they are undertaken”.

On the other hand, he states that "in place of concentrating efforts in accademic acreditation -for instance, ABET every four years- we propose that higher education institutions continuously improve their curriculum, by analyzing student learning outcomes in program execution, both before, during and after each academic period." 

How does your higher education institution analyze its graduate profile? Do you have any alignment issues in terms of resource planning?