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An article in EDUCAUSE by Randy Bass. The article is about how the formal curriculum is being disrupted as "high-impact educational practices" and "the experiential co-curriculum" move from the margins of higher education into common practice. He also addresses how the current "participatory culture " and the trend toward "informal learning" are affecting the curriculum. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors on how they can change their teaching practices to "keep pace with our expanded understanding of learning." - the description provided by Christopher Price, Director, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

"The goal of the DEEP project is to revise the Mechanical Engineering (ME) undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students. This paper describes the methods used to study the prerequisites and the resulting proposed curriculum revision. " Ilene Busch-Vishniac is the lead author on this paper.

Brand new article that just came out in the Higher Education Research and Development journal. It features researchers from La Trobe University in Australia, but may be of interest to people at the U of S.

A useful overview of a variety of curriculum maps

"Many of us who teach in higher education do not have a teaching background, nor do we have experience in curriculum development. We know our content areas and are experts in our fields, but structuring learning experiences for students may or may not be our strong suit. We've written a syllabus (or were handed one to use) and have developed some pretty impressive assessments, projects, and papers in order to evaluate our students' progress through the content. Sometimes we discover that students either don't perform well on the learning experiences we've designed or they experience a great deal of frustration with what they consider high stakes assignments. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) proposes that it's important to determine the area (zone) between what a student can accomplish unaided and what that same student can accomplish with assistance. This provides for consistent structural support, when required (Hogan & Pressley, 1997)."

This website is from the Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney. It features the work of Simon Barrie on graduate attributes, which is particularly interesting and important for units working on curriculum development.

This is the website for the Student Course Experience Questionnaire (SCEQ), deisgned to provide the University community with a basis for strategic, faculty level academic development and curriculum review to further enhance the quality of teaching and student learning.

"At Carnegie Mellon, we believe that for assessment to be meaningful (not bean-counting or teaching to the test!) it must be done thoughtfully and systematically. We also believe it should be driven by faculty so that the information gathered: * Reflects the goals and values of particular disciplines * Helps instructors refine their teaching practices and grow as educators * Helps departments and programs refine their curriculum to prepare students for an evolving workplace" Check out this website as a resource for assessment at the program level and the course level.

"Instructional Strategies Decision making regarding instructional strategies requires teachers to focus on curriculum, the prior experiences and knowledge of students, learner interests, student learning styles, and the developmental levels of the learner. Such decision making relies on ongoing student assessment that is linked to learning objectives and processes. Although instructional strategies can be categorized, the distinctions are not always clear cut. For example, a teacher may provide information through the lecture method (from the direct instruction strategy) while using an interpretive method to ask students to determine the significance of information that was presented (from the indirect instruction strategy). The five categories of instructional strategies are Direct Instruction, Indirect Instruction, Interactive Instruction, Experiential Learning, and Independent Study."

"Research indicates that students learn best by doing (the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy: applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating).  Because projects that incorporate these levels of cognition take time, they're often not included into the curriculum.  The flipped model helps to solve this issue."

"The traditional lecture may have been an efficient format for transferring information 100 years ago, but it's no longer practical in an era of exploding medical knowledge, says Dr. David Snadden, executive associate dean of education for the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "We've actually reached a stage where we can't fit [in] all the curriculum. It's just not possible." "The thing that's becoming really critical for us is helping our students understand how to manage information, access and sift information" as they'll need to do as practising physicians, he adds. Shifting course material onto the Internet offers a solution to both these challenges, Snadden says. In addition to freeing class time for more active learning, the model allows students to control the pace of their learning and "skip the things that don't seem relevant or that they already know." 

While the article is about leadership in educational technology, almost all of it applies to leadership in any area of educational innovation. "The conventional wisdom in education is that any school reform--be it curriculum, instruction, assessment, or teacher professionalism--is most likely to take hold in schools that have strong leadership. The same holds true for technology. Any educator will tell you the most successful implementation of technology programs takes place in schools where the principal sees him or herself as a technology leader."

"The greatest software invented for human safety is the human brain. It's time that we start using those brains. We must mix head knowledge with action. In my classroom, I use two essential approaches in the digital citizenship curriculum that I teach: proactive knowledge and experiential knowledge."

"Students pay many thousands of dollars for a college education in order to prepare themselves for the job market. If the college or university is providing the wrong stuff, that's a poor investment for the students."

"The resources listed here can provide you with some quick ideas on key teaching topics or starting points to explore various aspects of teaching. You can browse through the table of contents below or use the search box above to search our site."

Very cool resource on inquiry-based learning from the CILASS project in Arts and Social Sciences at Sheffield.

"In any discipline or field, a key goal as well as challenge is supporting the learning of all students despite their many differences. Through programs, consultations, and resources, CRLT supports teachers in creating learning environments where students of all identities and backgrounds can flourish." This website provides an endless supply of fresh resources regarding inclusivity, with one page of invaluable articles or links, leading on to more and more. Spending a little or a lot of time on this site will vastly increase your understanding of inclusive teaching, provide you with tools and ideas to implement, and provide you with some of the research that substantiates all that has been included on the site.

This book (available in the U of S library) is an excellent exploration of the role of disciplines on teaching and learning in higher education (edited by Carolin Kreber, 2009)

This website, maintained by Mick Flanagan at University College London, is the most comprehensive online site gathering information, references, videos, and articles about threshold concepts. It includes overviews about threshold concepts, as well as an alphabetical listing of threshold concepts discussed in the literature across the disciplines.