March 23, 2021

Curriculum Management Systems: It's Time for Critical Consideration

This content was previously published by Blackboard, now part of Anthology. Product and/or solution names may have changed.

This blog post is part of the Curriculum Matters blog series

By Professor Carol A. Miles, Senior Curriculum Management Architect, Blackboard, Australia & New Zealand

Since the 90s, higher education has seen a proliferation of increasingly advanced tools designed to enable and enhance university teaching and the effective management of student information.  During this time, higher education business offices have also benefitted from increasingly complex and efficient business systems to manage university purchasing, finances, human resources, etc.

Our ‘virtual learning environments’ have become more complex with learning management systems, lecture capture systems, library management systems, and research grant application systems, just to name a few.  It’s a curiosity, therefore, that the most academically-relevant systems (containing the entirety of a university’s teaching resources) have, for many universities, remained manual processes prone to duplication and imprecision.

Some may argue that the collective curriculum of a university represents its most valuable intellectual asset. It is therefore timely to consider the place for a systemic approach to the management of all phases of the curriculum cycle.

As we move forward into the future (I personally loathe the term post-Covid, so won’t use it here) of higher education, we have some critical considerations to make and opportunities for improvement abound.  One of these relates to the necessity to carefully consider the viability of each course offered due to current financial constraints and waning student numbers (especially international students for this year at least).

I have had an interesting conversation with a senior Academic Board member from one university who is struggling with the dilemma of which comes first – course organisation and rationalisation, or the implementation of a digitised curriculum management system to enable and guide these decisions.

My recommendation would be that while some organisational work may need to be done up front to identify and locate the various sources of curricular information, the implementation of a curriculum management system would be the ideal time to start discerning future course offerings in an objective and systematic manner. 

Accurate repositories of all things curriculum will also be required as universities struggle with which courses are offered in which modes.  Most universities were carefully planning their mix of face-to-face, blended, and online offerings when BOOM!  Covid-19 forced everything online virtually overnight.  Unravelling this and deciding on a new mix of course offerings, modes, learning outcomes, assessments, and activities would be well-facilitated by a digitised curriculum management system providing a single source of truth for each current (and past) offering and mode of delivery.

The above considerations, along with addressing several other conundrums pertinent to curriculum management in higher education will form the basis for this blog series – Curriculum Matters.

I look forward to providing some food for thought around these issues in the coming months, and sincerely welcome all feedback, opinions, objections and epiphanies along the way.  Stay tuned!

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Professor Carol A. Miles
Senior Curriculum Management Architect
Blackboard, Australia & New Zealand

Professor Carol A. Miles
Prior to joining Blackboard Inc., Professor Carol Miles was Director of the University of Newcastle's Centre for Teaching and Learning for eight years, with responsibilities for academic development, learning development, distance and blended learning support, and virtual learning environments. In this role, she established a leading edge institute for the development of innovative blended, hybrid, and online program and course offerings, through the BOLD Lab (Blended and Online Learning Design Lab).  Professor Miles also established the University of Newcastle Institute for Teaching Excellence, delivering teaching certificate programs to academics in a number of Asian universities, including those in India, China and Singapore.  Her personal and professional areas of academic interest include assessment in higher education, models of blended learning student support, and maturity of models of academic development.

Prior to immigration to Australia, she held the position of Associate Vice-President (Academic), Teaching and Learning, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In that role she initiated Carleton University Online (CUOL), one of Canada's most successful distance and blended learning programs.  While in Canada, she was Managing Editor of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Higher Education, and Chair of the Council of Ontario Educational Developers, as well as holding a number of other key national roles.  She completed her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology specializing in Educational Measurement & Evaluation at the University of Calgary in 1998 has taught for in a variety of disciplines, winning a number of teaching awards.

Find out more about the benefits of digitising curriculum management here 

The Anthology Team