The use of technology can improve integrated planning in your higher education curriculum by gathering student performance and learning information using big data, helping instructional design processes and data collection, as well as cross-checking with best practices using artificial intelligence.

We continue to address questions sent by many of our colleagues on our website and social media. Some colleagues are concerned about teaching innovation and how to focus the curriculum on developing skills. Others are interested in the role of Information Technology in the learning process.

That is a crucial question. We talk so much about the use of assessment technology in the classroom but overlook its capacity to help us improve and align our curriculum design and syllabus, and use data to manage instructional design.  

According to NACADA, an American organization that supports academic advising in universities:

“The best use of technologies is when their capabilities align with our advising goals.”

Let’s imagine a university with campuses spread out across a country and 20 different sections of a required foundation course. The college has five teachers working away from each other through the same curriculum, syllabus and learning outcomes, in online courses, blended learning or in a classroom.

However, there are some common concerns at the beginning of the school year.

• “This topic didn’t work for my students last year.”
• “I can’t cover all this in a semester!”
• “I should focus on just a few of these contents.”
• “My students already went through the basics last year.”
• “This is outdated, nobody in the industry works with these concepts anymore.”

As a result, students may end the semester passing the same course, but ending with completely different outcomes from one section to the other one.

So, what happens if the components of a course are misaligned?

Organizing your curriculum design with the help of higher education technology

When collecting feedback from alumni, there’re often two complaints about the curriculum and class syllabi:

• "I haven’t used X content and skills at all at work."
• "I wish I had learned more about y content and z skills in college; it would’ve made my job easier."

However, coordinating and collecting this information is a huge endeavor. More over because it requires flexibility with each area of the university, as well as obtaining hard data and evidence, faculties should keep that on their records.

Step 1: collect hard data from your content management system (CMS)

This is the wonder of big data analysis and the use of educational software. Your higher education institution may have online or b-learning courses, or use a CMS to manage courses, run tests and examinations, communicate with students and distribute content.

Data mining can find patterns in these large data sets, which can help profile student behavior and teachers focus their efforts and resources. The analysis of what happens here is key to find out what is working and what needs change.

According to the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, CMS is a great tool for analytics:

“Within a single online course section, then, an individual faculty member has access to a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data about student engagement, for example, number of words posted, total number of posts, average length of posts, and the text of every student comment or question from the first week’s discussion to the last. “

These transactions are archived during and after the semester and becomes a repository of data with potential applications to assess student learning.

Step 2: use tools to review if your intended learning outcomes match best practices

For instance, Inés Gil-Jaurena and Sandra Kucina Softic introduce at the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education the use of web tools to help trainers decide on assessment methods to use in online courses, as they automatically align learning outcomes stated by users with recommendations.

• Users describe learning outcomes that students should achieve in the course.
• Users choose verbs that best describe these outcomes, and the software reviews it.
• The process gets in motion and gives assessment advice, with lists of potential new methods.
• The engine estimates a score of the processes submitted by the user versus the suggestion.
• The tool calculates the best assessment method for the defined learning outcomes and provides a description to give users a better idea on how to use them.

After testing this tool with teachers, the researchers found that in some cases it suggested additional possibilities of assessment methods, and in other cases, indicated revising the existing ones.

Step 3: Prepare a process to evaluate the curriculum with all parties involved

The California Center for College and Career summarizes 11 steps for what they call a “Multi-disciplinary Integrated Curriculum Unit.”

This involves a process of connecting with industry and postsecondary partners, creating and sharing curriculum and performance maps, crafting questions, allocating responsibilities, reviewing and revising instructional sequences, establishing student assessments and much more.

However, how do we gather the data and how do we coordinate everyone involved in this process? It requires a thorough logistics.

Laurie Dickson and Melinda M. Treml, from the Northern Arizona University explain that the realm of program-level assessment “typically involves a group of faculty asking questions about the impact of their collective teaching on students’ learning in the academic program.”

“Well-designed assessment efforts can help faculty identify authentic points of success that can be used to celebrate student learning within an academic program and discover where students are having difficulties in order to make improvements. Using assessment findings to identify where students are struggling helps faculty determine where they should focus their improvement efforts.”

An important part of this approach, according to the authors, are finding out the bottlenecks in learning. However, to achieve this, faculties need to think collectively.

Step 4: Use technologies to channel the flow of information

Jisc, a British independent education charity, has studied the use of technology to help curriculum design. In that regard, they point at processes that could improve with the help of technology.

• Improved information flow.
• Reliable ‘single-truth’ sources of information.
• More efficient administrative processes.
• Efficiency and effectiveness gains from streamlined approval events.
• Increased access to pedagogical guidance for those designing and describing curricula.
• Greater consistency in quality assurance and approval procedures.

Over their research of 12 projects with universities in the United Kingdom, they have found significant enhancements using technology:

• A greater focus on the design process, allowing for light-touch approval events.
• Richer ways of engaging stakeholders, including students, in the development of curricula.
• Effective ways of representing and modeling curricula.
• Reduction in the time spent on administrative tasks.
• Improved understanding of educational principles as a benchmark for design quality.

Do you use educational software or assessment technology to review your school curriculum? How?