Useful curriculum approaches

While there is not a single, unified approach to designing curriculum, there are useful frameworks that can drive specific learning and teaching priorities. This section introduces some of these approaches and offers some relevant resources as well as examples in practice.

When considering which approaches may be useful for your teaching, it is worth familiarising yourself with the current directions of the Curriculum Transformation Programme (CTP) and the six Curriculum Design Principles. CTP is a comprehensive and long-term initiative at The University of Edinburgh, closely aligned to Strategy 2030.

Its aims include creating:

  • Curricula with good alignment, clear pathways and well managed transitions;
  • Curricula that are inclusive, participatory, and co-created;
  • Research-inspired and future-facing curricula deeply grounded in academic disciplines;
  • Flexible and boundary challenging curricula for super-complex global challenges;
  • Values-led and capabilities-focused curricula.

You can find out more on their CTP Hub SharePoint site.

Coined by John Biggs in 1999, constructive alignment is an approach to curriculum design which characterises knowledge acquisition as best supported through learner activities. The focus is on closely aligning teaching and assessment to intended learning outcomes.

That is, learning outcomes should be made explicit from the start; then, any teaching to follow seeks to engage students towards those outcomes, and assessments are designed to measure their attainment. Biggs writes: 'The learning activity in the intended outcomes, expressed as a verb, needs to be activated in the teaching if the outcome is to be achieved and in the assessment task to verify that the outcome has in fact been achieved.' (Please see below diagram).

A key element in 'constructive alignment' is the prominence of the constructivist approach to learning theory. Here, teachers do not pour knowledge into the heads of the students as if they were empty vessels, but students bring their own experiences and ways of knowing to the classroom with which to make meaning of the learning experience. Therefore, in this understanding of the educational process, what the student does is just as important as what the teacher does.

Below are some short readings to elaborate upon this approach of constructive alignment:

Diagram: What is contructive alignment?


What is constructive alignment? Intended Learning OutcomesL make available from the start; Assessment: measure students' attainment; Teaching: seek to engage students towards the intended learning outcomes.

Programme-level assessment as a curriculum approach ensures that assessment and feedback are placed at the core of the design process. That is, there is a focus on planning, conducting, and overseeing assessment and feedback holistically across programmes rather than a focus on assessment at the course level. This means assessment and feedback can build progressively on experience across the programme lifecycle.

This approach allows mapping of assessments across the whole programme which can be important in identifying overassessment, deadline log jams and other pressure points. It can help study across a programme to be experienced as a coherently joined up experience for students.

Ensuring students have a coherent learning experience across a whole programme helps them to develop their own understanding of the assessment process and to experience feedback as part of a developmental journey. This, in turn, can lead to enhancement of the educational experience and promote greater student satisfaction.

Programme learning outcomes can be tested across programmes in a more holistic way through programme teams working and planning together above the level of the course.

It can also help to reduce both staff and students’ workloads through removing unnecessary elements.

For more details, you can read the following resources:


Learning is optimised when students are actively involved in processing and making sense of what they are learning, making the learning more authentic and meaningful for them. This can be achieved through an approach to curriculum design known as 'co-creation'.

Co-creation of learning and teaching occurs when staff and students work collaboratively with one another to create components of curricula and/or pedagogical approaches.

(Bovill et al., 2016)

Co-creation of the curriculum provides an opportunity to challenge the status quo of teaching. It is an ultimately disruptive approach, which tests the accepted ways in which we have been led to believe teaching and learning should take place. Co-creation shifts learning and teaching from something we do to students, towards something we do with students.

Engaging students with course and programme design can have many benefits for both staff and students, including:

  • Increased motivation and engagement;
  • More developed metacognitive understanding of learning and teaching;
  • Stronger sense of identity;
  • Greater academic performance;
  • More positive relationships and deeper trust;
  • Increased sense of responsibility for learning and teaching.

(Cook-Sather, Bovill & Felten, 2014; Bovill, 2020)

When thinking about designing curriculum through a student and staff co-creation approach, you may want to think about the following:

  • What will students do during the course or programme?
  • Could some current or previous students be invited to be part of the curriculum design committee?
  • Could a focus group be held to ask students for their perspectives and ideas?
  • Can students be involved in designing their assessment?
  • How do students become part of the learning and teaching dialogue, so that they understand the terminology, policies, regulations, and acronyms that staff are normally only privy to?

A great example of co-creation in course design is exemplified by Prof Meryl Kenny, where 12 undergraduate students spent one of their modules designing another module for other students to take: Student-staff co-creation of a course: Understanding gender in the contemporary world.

The majority of Social and Political Science in Practice was run by these 12 students, through group work where they identified topics core to the Understanding Gender course, and then piloted and tested themed learning resources and activities.

There is more information about the co-creation approach under the 'student and staff co-creation' section.


'Future skills' covers areas such as employability, careers, entrepreneurial education, work-related learning, and transferable skills. Future skills is a dedicated workstream in the Curriculum Transformation Programme, which aims to tie-in with the high-level objective of creating the “Vision for The Edinburgh Graduate”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.

Employability and careers

Curriculum toolkit for embedding student development, employability, and careers: This University of Edinburgh toolkit introduces 10 curriculum design elements drawn from research and practice across the higher education sector that can support student development, employability, and careers.  For each element it provides motivation, examples and simple guidelines for embedding the element in your curricula. The toolkit also includes approaches for reviewing your own curriculum against any of these elements.

You can find a collection of blog posts that contextualises the importance of employability and careers in the landscape of the current Curriculum Transformation Programme: Careers and employability series 2022.

Enterprise education

Edinburgh Innovations works to equip teaching staff with the tools to instill entrepreneurial thinking across disciplines. Their Student Enterprise Team are now prioritising and increasing their capacity to support the embedding of enterprise in the curriculum. This includes one-to-one support for teaching staff, guest lectures, access to resources and case studies, thorough enterprise integration in the curriculum and a community of practice. The Edinburgh team are one of the very few universities in the UK able to provide this level of support. Some examples of embedding enterprise education in the curriculum from staff and student perspectives can be found in the 2024 Teaching Matters' series: ‘Embedding enterprise in the curriculum’.

Professor Ross Tuffee, author of the Scottish Government’s Policy Paper The Entrepreneurial Campus, offers a Teaching Matters' commentary on how universities can support the development on an entrepreneurial mindset in all students.


Challenge-based learning

As part of the Curriculum Transformation Programme, the University is putting more emphasis on learning that prepares students to engage effectively with global challenges in their work and wider lives. In general, challenge-based learning involves courses that are focused on topics of global significance, such as war or the biodiversity crisis.

Typically learning tasks involve real-world challenges, for example, writing a policy briefing or designing an educational intervention relating to the global challenge. The learning is often done in boundary crossing teams, involving different academic disciplines and collaborators outside the university. Within the Curriculum Transformation programme specifically, there is an emphasis on picking problems that are unbounded, complex, and resist straightforward definitions. These problems would be approached in multi or interdisciplinary ways, aiming to empower students to be successful change agents outside the classroom.

We know from research into students' perspectives that many students are very worried or angry about global challenges such as the climate emergency or inequality. Working together with their teachers to think about ways to contribute to addressing these 'wicked' problems can help give students hope and a sense that their concerns also matter to their teachers. Our students will all live and work in a world of uncertainty, rapid change, and existential threats. So, an excellent higher education must involve preparation for this kind of world. We also know that these capabilities are increasingly valued by employers.

Experiential learning

Experiential learning involves students learning through engaging with real-world, authentic tasks, often outside their usual university learning environments. It also involves processes of structured reflection on what students have learned during their work on these tasks. Often the learning process is more important than the outcome of students' attempts at the task. Students can learn just as much or more from reflecting on an attempt that went wrong as reaching a successful outcome. There is an overlap between challenge-based and experiential learning, in that both tend to involve complex or messy real-world situations. Experiential learning does not always focus on global challenges though, which is one distinction from challenge-based learning. Also, although structured reflection on the learning process can be very useful in challenge-based learning, it's not one of the defining criteria.

Experiential learning has many potential benefits. It can help students imagine themselves into the role of 'scientist', 'nurse', 'business leader', and so on and this move away from a 'student' identity can contribute to increased motivation and engagement in learning. Experiential learning is also ideal for helping students work through how to apply their learning in the wider world in a lower stakes way than when they actually join the workforce. It can be a great opportunity to realise that things going wrong can be a valuable learning experience, not just a problem. Experiential learning often helps students develop boundary crossing skills, like translating ideas between different communities and mediating disagreements. These are valuable capabilities for all walks of life.

Experiential learning in the Curriculum Transformation Programme emphasises active learning by doing. In these processes students should get a say in shaping or managing the project. Their reflective processes might involve, for example, challenging assumptions or exploring their values. It's important that a significant part of the assessment is experiential in nature, as assessment often drives learning.

Here are some short resources relevant to challenge-based and experiential learning:


A 'spiral curriculum' is an approach to course and programme design that encourages students to revisit topics and key concepts repeatedly throughout the curriculum, building on previous course material using a cyclical and spiralling technique. Using this approach, teachers can enable students to gradually build on their knowledge and understanding over time through deepening levels of complexity instead of promoting the memorisation of isolated facts. The spiral curriculum is widely attributed to the cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner.

A fantastic example of the spiral curriculum in action is the Design Agency, led by Zoe Patterson at Edinburgh College of Art:

Design Agency allows students on the Graphic Design programme to graduate with four years of full-time education with an honours degree and, simultaneously, four years of work experience. Each year, senior students team together in Creative Director roles to form their own profit-generating agencies. They brand and advertise themselves, and recruit first year students as interns, second years as junior designers and third years as senior designers. Each agency is mentored by a voluntary design professional... As each student progresses through the role of Design Agency intern, junior, senior, and director, their level of responsibility and workload increases. Each encounter of this spiral curriculum is assessed through reflective documentation often using diaries, blogs, films and PechaKucha style presentations.


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