Managing Curriculum Design in an Agile Environment

Fleur Corfield, Sam Rowley
Staffordshire University, United Kingdom

Background This paper focuses on the work that Staffordshire University are doing on supporting change in curriculum design and development as part of the JISC Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design programme. The Enable project will run for over 3 years and will join together its various change initiatives around curriculum development into a coherent and radical overall change process, ensuring stakeholder needs are understood, problem areas clearly identified and provide a sustainable solution to managing change, including producing process models, technical solutions and advice to inform the wider community. Approach used The project is using a “Theme”, “Spoke”, “Hub” approach where the Enable project is the hub that brings together various initiatives (Spokes) together under a number of different themes including Employer engagement, Innovation in practice, Process innovation, Core data and interoperability. Stakeholders have been engaged from both the university and its project partners, with experiences captured using interviews, online blogs and polls. Results so far The project has provided a base line of how it operates at the moment, it has created a number of process maps from all levels of curriculum design and development using enterprise architecture (including TOGAF). The project has also interviewed different stakeholders involved in curriculum design, and those involved in initiatives that impact on curriculum design, providing a list of common issues that initiatives are facing. Conclusion The same issues have been encountered by at least some of the initiatives, if not all, and impact across those initiatives, these issues have been left to fester. With the aid of Enable work has been started on addressing some of the more urgent issues. It is also clear that there has not been a vision for managing how issues get addressed by senior managers, or how their impact is managed across different aspects of curriculum design. The project has already identified required changes needed for project management within the institution, along with process models for identifying new issues and the required projects and engaging the relevant stakeholders.

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