A Framework for Curriculum Management
The Use of Outcome-based Approach in Practice
Martin Komenda
1,3
, Daniel Schwarz
1
, Jiří Hřebíček
1,2,3
, Jiří Holčík
1,2
and Ladislav Dušek
1,2
1
Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Masaryk university, Kamenice 3, Brno, Czech Republic
2
Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment, Masaryk university, Kamenice 5, Brno, Czech Republic
3
Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk university, Botanická 68a, Brno, Czech Republic
Keywords: Curriculum Planning, Outcome-based Approach, Web-oriented Platform, Technology Mashups.
Abstract: The need for guaranteed and high-quality education involving predefined curricula covering a
corresponding scope of input knowledge and skills required in subsequent practice has been gaining
momentum. Universities compile their curricula so as to ensure that they cover all steps essential for the
students to obtain employment later on. In the paper a brand new and original curriculum harmonization
approach within tertiary education is described by adopting an outcome-based approach and applying
modern information and communication technologies. We propose a model for curriculum management and
show how the model was implemented into practice in a particular field of study by using complex web-
oriented platform. Its primary objective is to make all efforts expended by users more efficient, as regards to
the creation, editing and control mechanisms in the form of deep content inspection.
1 INTRODUCTION
The proliferation of web technologies, in
conjunction with the social demand for improved
access to tertiary education, have stimulated the
rapid growth of e-learning (Chiu and Wang, 2008).
Individualised ease of access to information
resources and time flexibility or independency are
the major advantages impacting the users. Today,
modern information and communication
technologies (ICT) offer an interesting opportunity
to revolutionize the way education is provided
(Barnes and Friedman, 2003). The list, annotations
and curricula of compulsory subjects, compulsory-
optional courses and optional seminars are available
to students and teachers – typically in the local
learning management systems. However, the
differing levels of detail and description style
lacking any kind of standardization or
parameterization hamper transparency and
comprehensibility, particularly when searching for
information on the entire course of studies. As
a result, it is very difficult to look at the whole field,
specialization or studies from a broader perspective
and to enjoy the possibility of searching easily
across the curriculum and finding one’s way through
it to see what is actually being taught and how.
For many years, academic staff (such as teachers and
guarantors) has been in close touch with
sophisticated online educational tools. Hundreds, if
not thousands, of web-based tools have been created
in the last few years, taking the technology as a tool
metaphor to a new level (Oliver, 2010). These
systems have facilitated institutional curriculum
planning activities related to the creation of well-
balanced education. For an instance, the CanMEDS
initiative of The Royal College of Physicians and
Surgeons of Canada has introduced the
implementation of a national, needs-based, outcome-
oriented, competency framework that sets out the
knowledge, skills and abilities for specialist
physicians in order to achieve better patient
outcomes (Frank and Danoff, 2007), (Frank and
Bernard Langer OC, 2003). In (Huang, 2001), the
author presented an integrated outcome assessment
application that was completed by a database
designed to accumulate learner performance outputs
and to store them as a prat of learner’s profile. Data
from the profiles can then serve as valuable inputs in
providing personalized and customized learning
content or to conduct an overall performance
evaluation. Y. Mong et al. (Mong et al., 2008) have
described the web-based application LOTS
(Learning Outcome Tracking System), which
provides overall management of the learning
473
Komenda M., Schwarz D., H
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cek J., Hol
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cík J. and Dušek L..
A Framework for Curriculum Management - The Use of Outcome-based Approach in Practice.
DOI: 10.5220/0004948104730478
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 473-478
ISBN: 978-989-758-020-8
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
outcomes and access for both the student and the
teachers. In brief, LOTS consists of six components,
namely group, metric, learning outcome, incident,
correlation and analysis. The generic electronic
portfolio called ePortfolio (Cotterill, 2004) has
introduced an approach, which is being used to
support the evidencing of learning outcomes and to
facilitate personal development planning. In modular
courses, portfolios may provide focus on
programme-level as well as module-specific learning
outcomes. The whole process may help students to
become better at relating what they learned to the
requirements of teachers. S. Kabicher et al. have
presented a sophisticated approach, the use of visual
modelling within an interactive online environment
(ActiveCC Web) for a collaborative design, the
implementation and visualization of the curriculum
structure and the content (Kabicher and Derntl,
2008), (Kabicher et al., 2009). One of the options for
describing the content related to the curriculum is a
special taxonomy. T. G. Willett et al. have
introduced TIME (Topics for Indexing Medical
Education), a hierarchical taxonomy of topics
relevant to medical education. The content and the
structure of the topics within TIME was developed
in consultation with medical educators and librarians
at several Canadian medical schools (Willett et al.,
2007). Existing solutions, that were published, are
focused on the curriculum only from a certain
perspective, offering the agenda together with
selected functionalities and making the efforts to
provide them to students and teachers of the
respective institution in a transparent format.
However, we have not yet seen a complex
instrument that would cover all elements associated
with global curriculum harmonization, including
a detailed parametric description down to the level
of the learning units, and one that would be linked to
the learning outcomes (Komenda et al., 2013).
2 OBJECTIVES
Many thoughtful attempts were made in order to
develop a curriculum mapping or model, which
should increase academic rigor, sharpen students’
critical thinking and analytical reasoning, and
expose them to a richer subject matter.
Consequently, three following main research strides
emerged. 1) Instructional methods cover many
innovative methods in higher education: active
learning, experiential learning, inquiry-based
learning, discovery-based learning, problem-based
learning, project-based learning, collaborative and
cooperative learning, and understanding by design.
2) Evaluation and assessment provide new methods
developed to promote Bloom’s higher-order thinking
and other competencies required in the employment
market such as self-assessments, students’ portfolio,
open book test, case studies analysis, group projects,
prototyping, and technology-based evaluation.
3) Curriculum coherence and integration focus on
reforms in the curriculum structure: the integration
of general education across the curriculum, the
integration of the disparate elements of students’
learning experiences, and shifting from curriculum
objectives to attaining competencies (Pasha and
Shaheen Pasha, 2012). With regard to the mentioned
areas, this paper introduces an innovative curriculum
planning model, which is based on the outcome-
oriented paradigm. This performance-based
approach at the cutting edge of the curriculum
development offers a powerful and an appealing way
of introducing effective reforms in education
management. Here, emphasis is on the product –
what sort of graduates shall be produced – rather
than on the educational process itself (Harden,
1999). Our research is concentrated on the following
topics.
To propose a curriculum planning model, which
would channel clear communication between the
involved stakeholders (supervisors, guarantors,
managers and teachers).
To develop a robust web-oriented platform for
complex curriculum management, which would
provide a set of effective tools to be used for
creating, transparent browsing, and reviewing the
curriculum in a user-friendly environment.
A pilot curriculum reform and harmonization
using the described approach has been already done
within the study discipline of Mathematical Biology,
which is part of the Experimental Biology
curriculum at the Faculty of Science of Masaryk
University in Brno, Czech Republic. The goal of this
field of study is to produce professionals in the
domain of data analytics in clinical, biological and
environmental research. It also enables to attract a
new generation of interdisciplinary experts, needed
for processing and analysing data from experiments
as well as for properly interpreting the obtained
results, including communication and collaboration
with other experts in the given fields.
What will such an approach to curriculum
planning and harmonization bring for the student? It
will provide clear information about what
knowledge shall be acquired during the whole study
period, what topics will be in the schedule, what
fields will be covered repeatedly and how the
CSEDU2014-6thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
474
subjects will be interconnected with the learning
units and the learning outcomes. As for the teachers,
the description of the curriculum will mean an easy
way of clearly defining their lessons. In addition,
they will be able to browse the curriculum data from
all available courses according to the predefined
search parameters. And for the school managers, the
presented tools will provide a practical view on the
teaching. Further, it will also provide clear and
comprehensible data about who teaches what and in
what context, as well as information on the
deficiencies and overlaps in the curriculum. One of
the key benefits is a new kind of view on the
correlations between the theoretical and practical
parts of the study, which will help in deciding
whether the overall teaching pattern is correct or
some kind of restructuring is necessary.
3 METHODS
The current literature shows that the existing
curriculum models are unable to represent the needs
of the today’s dynamic & complex education. This is
due to the fact that the current society is more open,
diverse, multidimensional, fluid and more
problematical (Pasha and Shaheen Pasha, 2012). It is
one of the reasons why the issue of innovation has
been confronted in many fields as a mere tertiary
field by different academic institutions, as the
analysis of the current global situation indicates.
However, today a coherent solution that would cover
user-friendly tools for easy curriculum description is
still missing. Therefore, we have proposed a
methodological model, which is built on an
outcome-based paradigm. The Bergen ministerial
conference of the Bologna Process in May 2005
discussed reforms to degree structures, credit
transfer, quality assurance and curricular
development, which are transforming the European
Higher Education Area. Learning outcomes are
arguably best viewed as a fundamental building
block of the Bologna education reforms and bring
more transparency to higher education systems.
They have a reputation of being rather mundane and
prosaic tools, yet it is this basic underpinning
function that makes them so significant. It is
important that there should be no confusion about
their role, nature and significance, or the educational
foundations of the Bologna process will be
undermined (Keeling, 2006). The use of the
mentioned concept implies a fundamental paradigm
shift in curriculum design for many European
institutions offering higher education (Adam, 2004).
We also present here an original instrument based on
approved pedagogical methodology with the
integration of ICT mashups into the curriculum
management process. This web-based tool called
Learning outcome browser, which is part of our
web/oriented platform, covers all elements
pertaining to global curriculum harmonization,
including detailed metadata specification down to
the level of learning units and interconnections to
the learning outcomes. It opens the possibility of
reforming the curriculum structure effectively, as all
elements are available in the form of parametric
description. The organization of the data and its
linking are provided in the curriculum model, which
can be implemented without any restrictions within
any database technology. Figure 1 shows a
simplified entity relation data (ERD) model of the
fundamental attributes in the proposed solution.
Figure 1: Simplified data model of curriculum.
There are a number of technologies used during
the development process, rendering easy
implementation afterwards. The web-oriented
architecture runs on the most-used and widespread
web servers – either an Apache server or a Microsoft
Internet Information Server (IIS). We use
Linux/Ubuntu and Windows Server operating
systems for well-proven performance. All the tools
were developed with the use of PHP (version
5.3.10), XHTML, CSS 2, JavaScript, AJAX and
MySQL (version 5.5.32). We have also acquired the
services of third party frameworks, such as jQuery
(JavaScript library used for easier development of
web-centric technologies), CKEditor (WYSIWYG
text and HTML editor designed to simplify website
content creation) and DHTMLX components
(JavaScript grid control provides cutting-edge
functionality, powerful data binding, and fast
performance with large data sets).
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475
4 RESULTS
We have proposed a model for curriculum
management and harmonization and showed how
the model was implemented into education in a
particular field of study by using our original web-
oriented platform. Its primary objective is to make
all efforts expended by users more efficient, as
regards to the creation, editing and control
mechanisms in the form of deep content inspection.
The platform enables to introduce reforms into the
curriculum in several phases. Thus, unintended
consequences or suboptimal solutions may be
avoided.
The first phase sets up the structure of
curriculum, which is described in figure 2. The study
field is split into individual modules including
details of the responsible supervisors. Each module
contains a set of courses including its guarantors.
The rules used for learning outcome definition have
been already established according to the Bloom’s
taxonomy (Krathwohl, 2002). The composition of
the study field is closely connected with the ERD
model (see figure 1), which was designed to make
whole curriculum domain more understandable. All
the relations between modules, learning units,
outcomes and involved stakeholders provide the
basis for building web-based tool, which can easy
organize the metadata about the education.
Figure 2: Proposed curriculum structure.
The second phase covers the definition of the
learning outcomes (requirements on the graduate
from the selected field) based on a predefined
structure in an online environment including formal
and semantic verification. Outcomes typically
consist of a noun or noun phrase (the subject matter
content) and a verb or verb phrase (the cognitive
processes). Consider, for example, the following
objective: The student shall be able to remember the
law of supply and demand in economics. "The
student shall be able to" (or "The learner will," or
another similar phrase) is common to all objectives
since an objective defines what students are
expected to learn. Statements of objectives often
omit "The student shall be able to" phrase,
specifying just the unique part (e.g. "Remember the
economics law of supply and demand."). In this
form it is clear that the noun phrase is "law of supply
and demand" and the verb is "remember"
(Krathwohl, 2002). In our case each learning
outcome is represented by the so-called data
sentence, which is composed of a constant noun
prefix, Bloom’s taxonomy action verb and sentence
(e.g. student shall be able to describe the principle of
linear regression).
The third phase provides vertical harmonization,
which consists of verification and further discussion
within the individual module under supervision of
the responsible guarantor. The fourth phase brings
the process of horizontal harmonization, which
consists of follow-up discussions across all modules
under the management of supervisors. The fifth
phase entails the creation of educational content
according to the defined learning outcomes.
The authoring team, consisting of guarantors and
teachers of Mathematical Biology study field,
proposed a set of fundamental knowledge and skills
known as GMER (Global Minimum Essential
Requirements). This type of outcomes defines what
students are expected to know, understand and/or be
able to demonstrate at the end of a period of
learning, typically as a graduate. This concept has
been already used by a number of academic
institutions, especially in medical education
(Schwarz and Wojtczak, 2002), (Zhang et al., 2002).
The idea of learning outcomes helps determine what
teachers are supposed to teach, what students are
expected to learn and what knowledge all alumni
must have. It provides a correctly compiled and
balanced curriculum across selected study fields.
The management of Mathematical Biology is
currently delegated to 21 teachers who interact with
the study harmonization and streamlining process in
different roles and provide feedback to the
developers of the ICT mashups from which the web-
oriented platform is composed.
Table 1: Summary of Mathematical Biology study field.
Total number of modules 5
Total number of courses 26
Total number of learning units 261
Total number of learning outcomes 1281
Total number of teachers and guarantors 21
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Figure 3: Overview of learning outcomes with the use of data grid component.
One part of the platform, which was developed and
tested, is called Learning outcome browser and it is
based on the data grid component (see Figure 3). It
allows the users to access the data in a well-arranged
form and offers the possibility of applying advanced
search and filtering based on selected search
parameters. Thus, it provides an easy, clear and user-
friendly way of managing the curriculum, including
evidencing all executed operations such as creating,
editing and deleting learning outcomes and units.
The browser, which enables various views on the
curriculum for both teachers and guarantors, is
available online after the login process at
http://opti.matematickabiologie.cz/.
Figure 4: A learning outcome in detail.
The educational materials have been creating
according to the presented methodological model
and developed platform. It means that the content
completely respect the structure of described courses
and learning units and every individual topic is
always introduced by set of learning outcomes. For
the future works, we would like to analyse
educational metadata which have been already
defined by parametric elements comprising
predefined attributes. For instance, selected natural
language processing methods and visualisation
techniques would be used for the classification of
learning units into the classes or clusters, which can
discover information rich relations, imperfections
and potential overlaps across the chosen field of
study. Moreover, we would like to assess the created
curriculum from the Bloom's taxonomy perspective
and divide all the learning units into cognitive,
affective, and psychomotor domain.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper a brand new approach to curriculum
planning and management within tertiary education
was described. It adopted an outcome-based
approach and involved modern ICT technologies in
mashups that composed an original web-oriented
platform to implement the presented model approach
into education. The presented methodology and the
platform will help academics in their curriculum
reengineering efforts, as it provides a transparent
overview of the curriculum structure. Our approach
as well as the platform was adopted in practice by
senior teachers and professional guarantors within
the content inspection of Mathematical Biology field
of study. We believe that our model approach is
robust enough to be applied with a small set of
minor adjustments to any field of study. Further, we
also showed how the entire harmonization process is
phased to allow avoiding any suboptimal solutions.
Unlike the developed web-oriented platform, the
implementation of our model approach is fully
independent in the particular ICT as well as on the
particular field of study to be harmonized.
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477
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors were supported from the grant project
Interdisciplinary development of the study
Mathematical Biology reg. no:
CZ.1.07/2.2.00/28.0043, which is funded by the
European Social Fund and the state budget of the
Czech Republic.
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