The challenge of skill based integrated planning in higher education

Integration is an education issue today. UNESCO’s Post 2015 education agenda has stated as an objective that “all young people and adults have equitable access to lifelong learning opportunities to develop skills and competencies for life and work and towards fostering of personal and professional development”.

According to the United Nations agency, this objective should be monitored by a set of targets that measure the extent of opportunities provided to acquire knowledge and skills relevant to the world of work such as communication skills, critical thinking, problem-solving, team work, planning own work, conflict resolution, entrepreneurship, skills for health and safety, etc.

José María Fernández Batanero and Nerva Velasco from the University of Seville, value that the generation of knowledge today surpasses the data generated over the entire history of humanity. Today, these mass quantities of information demand not only selective comprehension and judging skills, but the teaching methods must shift their focus into the promotion of self-capabilities to learn in life.

The OECD states that a key advantage is that such competencies are largely invariant in any occupational and cultural context, and call for their application across higher education institutions, departments, and faculties.

The main objections of this approach is that they fail to address subject matter skills that are considered the primary goal of many individual higher education faculties. The integration of a set of generic capacities might threaten what academics successfully measure today, and fail to recognize the diversity of approaches given to content by different institutions.

Nonetheless, agencies are asking institutions to account for these skills both in international and local accreditation processes, posing a challenge for schools and universities for their integrated planning within their existing curricula.

For instance, among the standards of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), an American agency which has  accredited 522 universities in the USA, Egypt, Lebanon, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Chile, a key one is the promotion of General Education. That is, that “the institution’s curricula are designed so that students acquire and demonstrate college-level proficiency in general education and essential skills, including at least oral and written communication, scientific and quantitative reasoning, critical analysis and reasoning as well as technological competency”.

José Mª Fernández Batanero from the Department of Didactics and School Management of the University of Seville, thus poses several challenges in terms of faculty collaboration such as:

1. Organize in a manner that promotes a process of innovation, centered in the proposal of transversal skills as part of an institutional set of strategies and objectives.
2. A new working culture across departments, looking at project-based learning outcomes in a global perspective, to motivate and stimulate autonomy, creativity and application of knowledge in students, by working on complex projects based in real life issues.
3. The shared information in different teams of faculty will favor planning and making choices in teaching. A change in the working structure allows for the distribution of expert knowledge available, as well as the reception of valuable feedback.
4. Embrace an alternative to fragmentation in faculty, as the information is shared among all of the teachers of similar teams.
5. Coordination between different departments and faculty who teach same group of students, promoting teamwork not only regarding their field of specialization, but also within the similar areas of their departments in order to coordinate and connect contents.
6. Collective decision-making in the planning process facilitates students’ assimilation of contents across different disciplines, as they can easily relate them with other classes, reducing their feeling that there might be a lack of coordination between faculty members, and some contents are totally unrelated to others.
7. A horizontal networking in different departments, as a result of a new planning, communication and decision-making structure, integrated by different faculty representatives. These networks allow more reflection regarding the curricula in terms of the skills required for different majors and disciplines, a better comprehension of what aspects are necessary for quality results, and the discovery of strategies that can contribute to achieve standards that are already contained in existing sets of tasks and learning outcomes.
8. Break the separation of theory and praxis across all fields of knowledge, looking to interpret practical applications from theory, and explain theory with practical uses.
9. More flexible teaching, in order to adapt and promote creativity, is key to successful teachers.

Despite the eventual improvements of this process, academics are aware of conflicts and discrepancies in teachers daily work, which can difficult the will to change common practices. Institutional alignment to credit for a common set of skills at the end of a student’s education is a large, sensitive process that requires time, understanding, and a gradual implementation. That's why your thoughts are important.

What has been your challenge of skill based integrated planning in higher education? How have you applied this to your curriculum? What learnings have you come across? I appreciate your comments below.