Curriculum Design Principles

On this page, we set out the Principles and offer a few thoughts on their importance and how they could be implemented in the curriculum.

1) Be future ready

This principle is about developing curricula that can prepare students for unprecedented systemic change across the world and that can adapt quickly in light of these changes. This might involve thinking about how your programmes prepare students to flourish in a world shaped by the complex interactions between the climate and nature emergencies, global health challenges, artificial intelligence, datafication of most aspects of life, conflict, and injustice.

It’s important that our curricula help students understand that the future is not fixed and doesn’t need to continue in similar patterns trajectories to current times. Our students need critical awareness of the ways in which currently dominant world views can close down our thinking about possible and hopeful futures.

You might want to ask:

• How can your subject area help students think critically about current narratives about how the world is and will be?
• How can we equip students with the skills to navigate and influence the rapidly changing landscapes of the environment, technology, and society?

Programmes that address these challenges will likely involve boundary crossing between disciplines and with groups outside the University. That will involve collaborating to develop new shared understandings of what makes for good academic work.

2) Extend our impact

This principle is about how our programmes support us and our students to shape the future in areas like the climate and nature emergencies, the future of health and care, and data, digital, and AI. Many of our programmes already provide excellent examples of this work. For programmes that are less engaged in these areas at present, this might include considering opportunities for students to engage in challenge-led or experiential learning. These topics are covered elsewhere in this WordPress site.

Other good questions to consider might include:

• If a student from your discipline got involved with activism about health injustice, for example, what unique perspectives would their disciplinary background give them?
• What kinds of employment do students in your subject area most often go on to? How are AI and new data practices reshaping those professions? What learning experiences would prepare students for that?

3) Foster disciplinary community and belonging

This principle asks us to think about how students will come to grasp the particular ways of thinking, practices, and ways of being that are core to our disciplines. Often these are forms of tacit understanding. So how do we enable students to flourish in our disciplinary spaces? Dialogue is crucial here so that misunderstandings can be surfaced and addressed. This might be online or face-to-face, synchronous or asynchronous, or large or small groups, but it needs to be planned in.

You might want to ask:

• What forms of knowledge creation practices are core to your discipline?
• What communicative genres dominate?
• How will students get to practice these things under authentic conditions and get good feedback on how they are doing?

This principle is also about inclusion. Every discipline gives intended and unintended messages to students about: what kinds of people fit in here, whose knowledge and contributions matter, and what ways of being and acting are acceptable. So, we need to think about who that might exclude and how those students could come to feel that they matter and are welcome. This could be a simple as making sure our curricula include diverse examples, or that the pictures in our virtual learning environments show a wide range of cultures. Or it could be a deep and extended practice of decolonising our curricula.

4) Learn across boundaries

Complex social challenges require collaborations across disciplinary boundaries and between the University and a wide range of other groups: policy makers, community groups, people most impacted by the social challenge, businesses, and more. How can we enable boundary crossing programmes that make sense for our disciplines?

This is something that many parts of the University do really well, so there are lots of examples to learn from. If you are new to this, then the boundary crossing work may need to happen between teachers from different disciplines and between teachers and external collaborators before it can happen for students. There are too many examples in the educational literature of the boundary crossing being left to students in their group work, while each teacher covers their own topic and external contributors offer their own sessions.

This is something that needs space in our busy workloads. It starts with challenging conversations across boundaries about what we mean by key terminology, what norms and values matter to us, and how we can develop shared approaches to knowledge creation. Pedagogies building on this might involve: recorded conversations between stakeholders from different groups for students to watch, group learning activities focused on case studies, or reflection activities that explore the challenges of boundary crossing group work.

5) Focus on needs, inclusivity, and wellbeing

For our University to continue to thrive we need to design courses and programmes that support the inclusion and wellbeing of everyone involved – staff, students and other stakeholders. Many professional programmes already consider common wellbeing issues for their practitioners, and they have rich learning experiences to help students and staff reflect on how to thrive in relation to the particular challenges of those communities. Other programme design considerations might seem more mundane but are equally important.

We might consider whether the combined assessments across a programme lead to over-assessment that is stressful and exhausting for staff and students. Then we might be able to work through whether assessment of learning outcomes at the programme level could reduce these issues. For many subject areas, students’ backgrounds, life experiences, needs, and concerns can provide rich contributions and learning opportunities. For example, could you design group work that allows students to focus on what matters to them and develop processes for the groups to value what each participant brings. This can address needs, wellbeing, and inclusion all together.

6) Amplify Edinburgh’s excellence

This principle focuses on what is distinctive about our city and our University that can contribute to our unique educational offer. This opens up all sorts of interesting questions for many programmes about how we could learn outside the classroom in the city.

For example, questions you may consider include:

• What could Edinburgh’s history, heritage, urban settings, or parks contribute to your programme, and how could your students contribute to the city?
• Could your assessments involve students in: designing an information board, collaborating with a conservation group, putting on a play for children about an historical event, quietly observing an area of the city they would usually walk past, etc.?

This principle also asks about our research excellence and how that informs our programme and course design, allowing us to consider:

• Research-led teaching has long been a core aspect of Edinburgh programmes but is there more that could happen in your programme? For instance, in some subject areas we tend to think that research at the forefront is just too advanced for students to engage with, but they might love to hear a world-leading researcher share how they felt about some of their career highlights.
• Are the assessments that students do as authentic as possible to how research would actually be carried out in your subject area?
• Do students get to practice the forms of communication that you would use at a conference in your subject?