Getting a grip on your curriculum development: a Curri Map for large education projects

Written by: Dr. Florian Verbeek

Perhaps you are involved in an exciting new project for a new or reformed Bachelor’s or Master’s programme. Everyone has ideas. There are many people you want to talk to, examples you want to study, documents you need to read, and questions you still need to answer. It can be difficult to know where to start. 

Or perhaps the project has already been running for months. Working groups have formed, action points assigned, and people are producing summaries, slides and reports. Everyone is busy but are they doing the right things? Both situations call for the same thing: a moment to pause and orient. The Curri Map is designed for exactly that. It helps project groups and advisors orient themselves, check whether important questions have been addressed, and decide what support or decisions may be needed next. 

Are we confusing activity with progress?

Large curriculum projects often start with energy. People gather documents, compare other programmes, organise meetings, consult stakeholders, discuss possible course structures and collect ideas for innovation. These activities want to be valuable, but they can also pull a project in many directions at once. A busy project is not automatically a well-guided project.

A project group can have a full agenda while still avoiding the most important question: what kind of decision are we actually preparing for?

Consider a benchmarking exercise that turns into a debate about course structures or learning lines. Without a clear question to guide it, the group may start designing before it has clarified what problem the new curriculum is meant to solve. This happens when certain steps in the analysis phase are skipped or unconsciously let go.

Process awareness means pausing to ask: what kind of work is needed now? Is the project still clarifying the reason for change? Is it building a shared educational direction? Is it ready to make design decisions? Or is it moving into development before earlier questions have been sufficiently answered?

The Curri Map does not answer these questions for you. Its value is that it creates a shared language for orientation. It helps participants place actions, documents and decisions in context, so that the project can move forward deliberately rather than reactively.

Where are we, what is important, what’s next?

Every project needs both structure and a tailored approach. The Curri Map can help project groups and advisors orient themselves as they make decisions along the way. 

The Map is subdivided into five phases: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. Each phase includes main objectives, actions that are often needed, products or documents that may be developed, and decisions that are usually required at that point. (See here)

One recurring layer in the Map is easy to overlook: planning, organisation and communication are not only start-up tasks. They need to be revisited throughout the project. As work moves from one phase to the next, the relevant people, decisions, documents and communication needs change. A project group may need to ask repeatedly: do we still have the right people involved? Are responsibilities clear? Are decisions being made in the right place? Does the wider community understand what is happening and why?

Here is what to typically think of in each phase:

• Analysis – why change? This may include collecting various data from stakeholders & a benchmark, developing a problem analysis or business case, and securing leadership commitment.
• Design - what should we do? This phase covers vision development, programme learning outcomes, and the design of a curriculum framework. Only after this does it usually become wise to move into more detailed decisions about courses, learning lines, assessment and the structure of academic years.
• Development – how should we do it? Translating the design into education. Development teams work on courses, assessment, learning activities and teaching materials. Attention is needed for timetabling, staffing, professional development, formal programme documentation, evaluation and implementation. 
• Implementation and Evaluation – let’s start, but did we do it? These two phases are not something to think about later. Preparation for both phases starts early.

Are we balancing flexibility with structure?

Structure and process awareness matter, but the Curri Map can do more harm than good if used as a rigid checklist. Curriculum reform is rarely linear. It requires a flexible, iterative, and tailored approach. 

Sometimes, during course development, it becomes clear that the vision is not yet specific enough. Sometimes a project starts with an urgent problem, but without a shared image of the desired future. Sometimes support has to be rebuilt once abstract ideas become concrete and start to affect courses, responsibilities or positions.

That is why the map works best as a tool for conversation. A project group can use it to ask: where are we now? Which questions have we not yet answered sufficiently? Which decisions are we postponing? Which actions actually belong to a later moment? 

For individuals the map can help prepare for meetings: which questions do I want to ask? Which blind spots do I see? Which topic needs to be on the agenda? 

One guiding question: does this overview help? If not, set it aside, it is a tool, not a protocol.

Four points to pay attention to in large curriculum projects

The following tips are drawn from the literature and documentation underlying the Curri Map.

1. Start with both urgency and direction
A curriculum project needs a convincing reason for change, but urgency alone is not enough. If it is clear why change is needed, but not where the programme wants to go, the project may get stuck in separate problems. An attractive vision without a shared sense of urgency, on the other hand, can remain non-committal. Early on, pay attention to both questions: why do we need to change, and what kind of graduates do we want to educate and why?

2. Make roles and decision-making explicit
Large projects involve many people: teachers, students, programme directors, examination boards, curriculum committees, policy officers, faculty boards and sometimes external partners. This is necessary, but it can also become confusing. Who contributes ideas? Who designs? Who reviews? Who decides? And who will carry responsibility once the new curriculum is running? Clear role descriptions prevent participation and project organisation from becoming entangled.

3. Develop the professional community as well
A new curriculum does not run on documents, learning outcomes and course descriptions alone. It more importantly has to be carried by the people who will teach and coordinate the programme. New educational ambitions often require new expertise, new forms of collaboration and a shared language. Do not postpone professional development until the curriculum is almost ready to launch. Use the project itself to build the community that will keep the curriculum alive.

4. Design evaluation and handover from the beginning
Attention often fades once a new curriculum is running. Yet this is precisely when the question arises whether original ambitions are becoming visible in practice. What do we want to monitor? Which data will we collect? Who will interpret the results? And how do we ensure that new programme directors, teachers or committees still understand the original vision? A good curriculum project does not end with implementation. It ends with a detailed handover and targeted improvement plans.

When to use the Curri Map

The map is useful at several moments:

• at the start of a project - to discuss scope, roles and first milestones;
• at evaluative and decision moments - to check whether important questions and action points have been skipped, or whether recent developments require revisiting earlier steps;
• when you feel lost and unprepared – perhaps you were on holiday or focused on another project, and need to re-orient yourself.

References:

Biggs, J., Tang, C., & Kennedy, G. (2022). Teaching for Quality Learning at University (5th ed.). Open University Press. 

Branch, R. M., & Varank, İ. (2009). Instructional design: The ADDIE approach (Vol. 722). Springer. 

Fullan, M. (2016). The new meaning of educational change. Routledge. 

Kang, S. P., Chen, Y., Svihla, V., Gallup, A., Ferris, K., & Datye, A. K. (2022). Guiding change in higher education: an emergent, iterative application of Kotter’s change model. Studies in Higher Education, 47(2), 270-289. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1741540 

Kezar, A. (2018). How colleges change: Understanding, leading, and enacting change (2nd ed.). Routledge. 

Richards, J. C. (2013). Curriculum Approaches in Language Teaching: Forward, Central, and Backward Design. RELC Journal, 44(1), 5-33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688212473293 

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage Publication Inc.

With thanks to many O&T colleagues who shared their work and experiences, and the Wageningen University Research (WUR) curriculum support toolkit (https://edusources.nl/materials/334fb41f-fa9a-4193-b0c7-7a9e8f73582d/curriculum-support-roadmap) as explained and shared by advisor Roos Köhler.