Purpose: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were established by the UN in 2015 as an international call to action to end poverty, protect the environment, and ensure that everyone will live in peace and prosperity by the year 2030. (UNDP, 2015). Out of the 17 Goals, Goal 4 talks about "ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education…

The changing global scenario throws a big responsibility to higher education institutes to prepare future ready students. The curriculum is the most important input, which can play a vital role in the overall development of students. Present work identifies the need for curriculum change in the 21st century and presents a responsible approach to…

A number of commentators have recently called for a re-examination of the purpose and value of undergraduate education, arguing that change is required if universities are to deliver the value in educational outcomes that students and communities now require for a changing and challenging world (for example, Aoun, 2017; Bok, 2020; Davidson, 2017;…

Entrepreneurial minded learning (EML) is a pedagogical technique that gives students the tools to identify opportunities, focus on impact, and to create value through their solutions. The entrepreneurial mindset builds upon three key elements: curiosity, connections, and creating value (3 Cs). A biomedical engineering course was developed using…

Due to current and upcoming needs in the discipline and accreditation, the Nutritional Sciences faculty at a major university reformed their curriculum using backward design. As part of this process, they developed new learning outcomes that aligned to the institutional learning outcomes and mapped these new outcomes across the major's required…

Much scholarship available on team-teaching focuses on K-12 programming, with limited examples in post-secondary education. Adding to the growing research on college-level team-taught courses, this reflection describes how interdisciplinary team-teaching can offer not only a pedagogically innovative experience for students but also highlight the…

Core concepts provide a framework for organizing facts and understanding in neuroscience higher education curricula. Core concepts are overarching principles that identify patterns in neuroscience processes and phenomena and can be used as a foundational scaffold for neuroscience knowledge. The need for community-derived core concepts is pressing,…

The fundamental structure of a typical mainstream two-semester organic chemistry course, populated mostly by life science majors and taught at universities throughout the United States, has changed little since the 1970s. However, much of the research on learning in organic chemistry has been devoted to characterizing student difficulties of…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] A level of curricular design, called "design tactics," is identified to fill a gap in the research literature between the broad principles that guide curriculum development and the detailed writing of specific activities and lessons. The use of…

Higher education programs face challenges to increase accountability regarding student achievement. Course misalignment occurs as instructors interpret course objectives differently, making changes to the course content without considering overall program alignment and purpose. Misalignment prompts academic programs to revisit its curriculum to…

The debate on the value and relevance of commerce versus business administration education is at its full swing in Pakistan. Conventional focus of the commerce education has been on areas like accounting and trade, while business administration education focuses more on areas like management and administration of a business entity. Recently,…

If the German-speaking world is conceived of as a pluralistic society, open to migration, and integrated in global networks, then what could "Heimat" mean for German Studies? This article presents a rationale and curricular design model for critically unpacking the cultural narrative of "Heimat" within a globalized context. As…

While occupying various academic leadership positions, the authors repeatedly encounter the use of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) accreditation to influence decision making around engineering curricula. For instance, ABET criteria are commonly cited as the reason why particular changes to engineering programs, such…

The focus of this article is on the re-design of a fourth year Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) programme at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Due to the changes in teacher qualifications, as outlined in the 2015 "Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualification" (MRTEQ) policy document, Higher Education Institutions were…

In response to calls for curricular change in foreign language programs and institutional requirements to evaluate programmatic effectiveness, this article presents a backward design approach to the redesign of an introductory French curriculum grounded in the framing concept of cultural literacy. In addition, data from student evaluations,…