Post-Covid Curriculum: Competency Models, Not Textbook Models

Reviewing or developing programmes in higher education usually follows a highly bureaucratic, product-based pathway: documents, checking, more checking, more documents. Or else benchmarking, which too often means looking at what others did and copying it with slight modifications. That is not curriculum development.

The work institutions avoid

Real pedagogical and curricular engineering means collecting, documenting and saturating relevant data. It is not a pathway that higher education institutions, especially in the public sector, like to take. The same shortcut is followed in accreditation.

What competency-based review is not

There are many models for evaluating and modelling curricula, but the most suitable for the post-Covid context is the one that takes competency as its framework. What we privilege in curriculum evaluation or review is not:

• shifting or renaming course titles and content;
• modifying the outcomes or objectives on paper;
• the religious choice of a specific textbook as the condition for the programme to breathe and develop.

Reshuffle the process

Instead, in our view, the first thing to do is to reverse the order of work:

1. Document and identify the practices of the disciplines at stake in the local context, especially where a corresponding professional practice exists in the local economy and society.
2. Select and classify those practices to develop standards of practice. This information comes from data gathered through interviews, focus groups and surveys.
3. Sit down as a team and align disciplinary knowledge with what was collected from the profession, or from the real-life context of the discipline or content taught.
4. Select and categorise.
5. Only then build the content, activities, pedagogies, training modes and assessment methods, aligned with the newly engineered curriculum.

I hope this clarifies the point.