Strategic Curriculum Change

The curriculum is a live issue in universities across the world. Many stakeholders – governments, employers, professional and disciplinary groups and parents – express strong and often conflicting views about what higher education should achieve for its students.
Many universities are reviewing their curricula at an institutional level, aware that they are in a competitive climate in which league tables encourage students to see themselves as consumers and the university as a product, or even a ‘brand’. The move has prompted renewed concern for some central educational questions, about both what is learnt and how.
Strategic Curriculum Change explores the ways in which major universities across the world are reviewing their approaches to teaching and learning. It unites institution-level strategy with the underlying educational issues. The book is grounded in a major study of curriculum change in over twenty internationally-focused, research-intensive universities in the UK, US, Australia, The Netherlands, South Africa and Hong Kong. Chapters include:



Achieving curriculum coherence: Curriculum design and delivery as social practice


Assessment in curriculum change


The whole-of-institution curriculum renewal undertaken by the University of Melbourne, 2005-2011


The physical and virtual environment for learning


People and change: Academic work and leadership


This book presents a theorised and contextualised approach to the study of the curriculum, and carries on much-needed research on the curriculum in higher education. It is an essential for the collection of all academics at university level, and those involved in policy making, quality assurance and enhancement.

Professor Paul Blackmore is Professor of Higher Education and Director of Kings Learning Institute, King’s College London, UK.
Dr Camille B. Kandiko is Research Fellow at The Kings Learning Institute, King’s College London, UK.

1. The Networked Curriculum 2. Achieving curriculum coherence: Curriculum design and delivery as social practice 3. A tradition of reform: The curriculum at Brown University 4. Curriculum Organisation and Outcomes 5. Transforming Student Learning: Undergraduate curriculum reform at The University of Hong Kong 6. Shaping the curriculum: a characteristics approach 7. Assessment in curriculum change 8. Enabling change: processes and resources 9. People and change: Academic work and leadership 10. The whole-of-institution curriculum renewal undertaken by the University of Melbourne, 2005-2011 11. Supporting change through development and evaluation 12. The physical and virtual environment for learning 13. Curriculum structure as a key variable affecting performance in higher education: The case of South Africa 14. Towards more successful curriculum change