Agile Curriculum Sustainability: Continuous Improvement
When it comes to implementing a curriculum that aligns with an agile PBL ecology for learning, there are a myriad of elements and factors to consider, and they all impact to some extent on the ultimate success: graduates who can demonstrate the desired le
- PDF / 266,650 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 246 Views
Agile Curriculum Sustainability: Continuous Improvement
Introduction When it comes to implementing a curriculum that aligns with an agile PBL ecology for learning, there are a myriad of elements and factors to consider, and they all impact to some extent on the ultimate success: graduates who can demonstrate the desired learning outcomes and are empowered with agile twenty-first-century skills that allow them to contribute to society with agency. The development, implementation and teaching of an agile PBL curriculum are ideally at the very least a wholeof-institution endeavour, which involves the micro- and exo-systems, but the goal from the beginning should always be to consciously involve all systems in the ecology. Excluding, for example, the macro-system from curriculum and pedagogy exposes the curriculum to the risk of not achieving the desired learning outcomes identified and required for a twenty-first-century supercomplex world. However, we do realise that a fully functioning curriculum in alignment with an agile PBL ecology for learning is an ideal situation, whereby the whole institution is on the same page and ‘every duck is lined up’. This whole-institution implementation represents one end of a continuum, whereas agile PBL implemented in single courses taught by individual enthusiastic lecturers is considered at the other end of the continuum. The latter is primarily based within the micro-system, while the former involves interplays and interconnections in the entire ecology. The case we outline in this chapter leans towards the former, and the idea is that readers treat this as the ideal scenario, as something to work towards, but we do recognise that in many universities, implementing PBL in the way we are imagining here would constitute a radical change and would require a radical overhaul in all aspects of the way the institution functions. This may not be possible or feasible in many universities, at least not in the short term, so the idea is to concentrate on what would be an institutional ‘feasible utopia’ (Barnett, 2013). However, it is worth considering Paul’s (2010) warning in this respect:
© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 M.Y.C.A. Kek, H. Huijser, Problem-based Learning into the Future, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2454-2_8
151
152
8 Agile Curriculum Sustainability: Continuous Improvement
One of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the implementation process of a PBL curriculum is to create a mixture of a traditional and a PBL curriculum. Although this may seem an attractive compromise after controversial discussions within a faculty, this ‘PBL light’ option (integrating components of both PBL and non-PBL-based methods) is more expensive, confusing, divisive, and cumbersome to implement than an all-out transition to a PBL approach. When in doubt or unable to implement a complete changeover, one would be wiser to stick with the conventional curriculum as a whole. (p. 149)
There are a number of examples of institutions that have designed their whole institution around
Data Loading...
