Educators’ Perception Towards Automation of Curriculum Design Process for Institution of Higher Learning in Malaysia

Thong Chee Ling Faculty of Computer Science and IT,

University Putra Malaysia Malaysia

Email: chloethong@ucsi.edu.my

Yusmadi Yah Jusoh, Rusli Abdullah, Nor Hayati Alwi

Faculty of Computer Science and IT University Putra Malaysia

Malaysia Email: yusmadi@fsktm.upm.edu.my;

rusli@fsktm.upm.edu.my;nalwi@putra.edu.my

Abstract—Curriculum design is an important phase in curriculum development process. Curriculum design precedes its submission to national regulatory body for approval. Curriculum design process plays an important role in helping educators to produce curriculum that is incompliance with the program standards and guidelines set by national regulatory body. The traditional approach requires much cumbersome manual iteration, making the process longer and error-prone. It is believed that automating the design process by utilizing advanced IT/ICT technologies helps to increase effectiveness and efficiency. Hence, a preliminary study is conducted to determine the perception of needs relative to automation of curriculum design process and current obstacles or issues during the design process. Five experienced educators from both private and public Instituitions of Higher Learning in Malaysia who are involved in curriculum design are interviewed. The design process may vary from one university to another, as well as from one faculty to another. The purpose of this study serves as a preliminary study. This preliminary study has been conducted based on the authors’ prior work. This study creates an awareness of the extent of needs for design process automation supported by IT/ICT. These needs may be reflected in the planning of future research.

Keyword: Educators, Curriculum, Curriculum Designer, and Constrcution Alignment

I. INTRODUCTION

Curriculum design is one of the important curriculum development processes to any Institution of Higher Learning (IHL) as it plays a critical role in helping curriculum designers to produce quality work. The process of designing curriculum is time-consuming and error-prone. Furthermore, even through when a curriculum is completed, it has to go through approval process. Many times, the entire design process will go through duration of 6 months to one year to complete before IHL can proceed to offer the approved program. Based on the previous work conducted by the authors, it is found that curriculum design process is

a tedious, time-consuming and error prone process [1]. This paper studies the needs of automating curriculum design process with the goal of increasing efficiency and efficiency. The purpose of this study is to determine the perception of needs of a group of educators who are also curriculum designers in relation to automation of curriculum design process. At the same time, the perception of current obstacles and issues are also determined in this study particularly in the area of construtive alignment in curriculum.

The organization of the paper is as follows: section II discusses the importance and use of automated tools to curriculum design/management, and how it helps to facilitate the entire design process, perception and obstacles encountered by curriculum designers during design process and some related work. Section III presents the disucssion and findings and Section IV concludes the paper.

II. BACKGROUND

A. Importance of Automated Tool to IHL in Facilitating Curriculum Design and Management There are quite a number of automated systems in the market to support and facilitate curriculum process. Majority is developed or customised systems, which suit the specific needs of IHL. In this section, starting from year 1993 to 2009, there are selected systems/tools used to support curriculum design. Among all some are Authoring Instructional Materials (AIM) program, which is a set of software tools for curriculum design and maintenance for use in the Navy [2]; Curriculum Information System (CIS) is being developed to provide comprehensive summaries of curricula content and structure. The general structure and purpose of CIS are expressed in three distinct system designs: a curriculum database (most helpful for administrators), a curriculum textbase (for faculty) and electronic syllabus (for students) [3]; Curriculum management system (CMS) which is an automated system supports entire curriculum process from planning to implementation to assessment and it also known as an automated system that supports the definition, visualization,

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analysis and assessment of an educational instituition;s desired curriculum [4]; Curriculum Management System (CurrMIT) is used in the field of medicine in IHL which is used to manage medical school curriculum and it is released and used by medical school members since 1999 [5] and Web-based application that helps in designing any curriculum in real time. The Web-based engine incorporates several important features, allowing the verification of the proposed curriculum coherance and the generation of statistics necessary for academic and accreditation purpose [6]. The common purposes of developing these tools that discovered in this study are they are used to assist curriculum designers in automating curriculum design process. Some of the common features are: systems are built based on a specific curriculum model and the model is used as a guideline for curriculum design. One of the example is CMS is it is developed based on IS’ 97 curricula. According to Floyd et. al. [4], model curricula have been part of the Information Systems arena since the beginning. The intial purpose serve by IS’ 97 and other model curricula was to establish a validated body of knowledge for Information Systems [7]. Model curricula have played an important role in both establishing IS as a discipline and guiding its development in many diverse environment. In the example of CMS, IS ’97 gives valuable insight into the appropriate content and structure of the IS curriculum [4]. Furthermore, in the field of Information Technology, there are many different curricula models used as guidelines by curriculum designers in designing curriclum such as ACM model.

B. Current Mechanisms for Curriculum Design in Malaysia

Current approaches to curriculum design typically revolve

around curriculum committee [4]. A formal process of curriculum design involves curriculum committee consisting of representatives that may include academic and administrative staff of the IHL, government agencies, professional bodies and industries and other stakeholders. The primary role of the committee is to design and prepare curriculum and relevant programme documents. In Malaysia, this group of committee must be familiar with Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA) and Malaysian Higher Education (MOHE) regulations on programme structure and admission requirements with the discipline or the field of study [8]. Curriculum design cycle which consists of four stages as illustrated in Figure 1 and each stage involves a list of specific activities is shown in table 1.

These activities are monitored by personnel who are

identified by IHL and they are also known as curriculum stakeholders.

Figure 1: Curriculum Design Cycle (Source: Guidelines To Good Practices: Curriculum Design

and Delivery, August 2010)

Stage Curriculum Design Activity

Plan

• Converse a Curriculum Committee • Assess needs and issues • Identify key issues such as

Malaysian Qualification Framework (MQF) levels and level descriptors, and institutional vision/mission

• Identify trends in the field of study/profession

Develop

• Articulate programme philosophy • State programme goal(s) • Sequence programme objectives

and outcomes • Develop courses/modules • Identify and develop programme

staff and physical resources • Develop and identify learning-

teaching activities, assessment tools and procedures

Implement

• Deliver the programme • Assess the achievement of learning

outcome

Evaluate

• Review the programme • Determine the success of the

programme • Update the programme

Table 1: Curriculum Design Activities for a Programme

(Source: Guidelines To Good Practices: Curriculum Design ad Delivery, August 2010)

Plan

Develop

Implement

Evaluate

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This paper focuses on the second stage, as curriculum design process will take place in this stage. There are many activities taking place in second stage and these activities need to conform to each others [8] and form the curriculum structure. The conformation among these activities is the constructive alignment, which is an example of outcome-based education (OBE) [9]. The following section presents the curriculum design process with the emphasis on constructive alignment. C. Constructive Alignment John Biggs in his book written in 2003, he points out that: ‘A good teaching system aligns teaching method and assessment to the learning activities stated in the objectives, so that all aspects of this system act in accord to support appropriate learning. This system is called constructive alignment, based on the twin principles of constructivism in learning and alignment in teaching’ - pp11 They are several principles of constructive alignment and there are: the curriculum that we teach; the teaching methods that we used; the assessment procedures that we use, and methods of reporting results; the climate that we create in our interaction with students; and the institutional climate, the rules and procedures we have to follow [9]. The diagram in figure 2 depicts the constructive alignment model and it gives an insight into the design of aligned curriculum, which is mentioned in the Guidelines To Good Practices: Curriculum Design and Delivery (GGP:CDD) provided by MQA in August2010. A brief explanation of the diagram in figure 2 is as follows: in the teaching system, the curriculum objectives lie in the middle; the objectives are expressed in terms of desired outcomes that constructive activities are mostly likely to achieve. Activities are verbs and verbs need to be specified that students have to enact. Once the objectives are specified, the teaching/learning activities (TLAs) are designed. Finally, the assessment tasks are selected and they will tell how well the students have met the criteria expressed in the objectives. Objectives, teaching and assessment are now aligned using the verbs in the objectives as markers for alignment. In the learning system, the learning activities are elicited by TLAs, or by assessment or by students’ own priorities will produce an outcome that is matched via the assessment to the objectives [9].

2. The Learning System

Figure 2: Aligning curriculum objectives, teaching/learning activities (TLAs), and assessment tasks

(Source: John Biggs, 2003)

Curriculum objectives

expressed as verbs that students have to

enact A

The very best understanding that

could be reasonably expected might

contain verbs such as hypothesis, apply

to ‘far’ domains B

Highly satisfactory understanding might contain verbs such as explain, solve, analyse, compare

C Quite satisfacoty

learning, with understanding at a

delcarative level:verbs such as elaborate, classify, cover topic a to n

D Understanding at a

level that would warrant a pass: low-

level verbs, also inadequate but

salvageable higher-level attempts

Assessment tasks

evaluate how well the

target verbs are deployed

in context

The highest level verb to

be clearly manifested

becomes the final grade (A, B, C,

etc.)

Teaching/learning activities

designed to generate elicit desired verbs

May be:

teacher-contolled

peer-controlled self-controlled

as best suits context

1 The teaching system

Learning Outcomes

Learning Activities

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The constructive alignment can be considered as a complex process and it must be completed during the curriculum design process at stage 2 (refer table 1). Since it is a complex and tedious process, as presented in the recent research conducted earlier in 2010, 47.8 percentage of the curriculum designers from 18 IHLs in Malaysia claimed that it is a time-consuming and error-prone task [1]. Therefore, this preliminary study is carried out to determine the perception of needs in relation to automation of curriculum design process and current obstacles during the design process. D. Methodology This is a qualitative research and the type of qualitative method used is interview. Interview is particularly useful for getting the story behind a participant’s experience [10]. The interview protocol is by posing questions to the interviewees who are academicians who manage curriculum design process. Five experienced curriculum designers were interviewed. The interview was conducted one time only for half an hour in each interview session. The purpose of interview is to determine the needs of automating curriculum design process and at the same time find out the obstacles/issues encountered or raised by curriculum designers. Data analysis technique used in this research is content analysis, which helps identify phrases, keywords, sentences and phrases. The respondents comprises of two deans, one head of IT department, one associate professor and one senior lecturer. The two deans are from private universities and the other three are from public universities. All of them have three to ten years of expereinces in curriculum design. E. Interview Results Educators who are also curriculum designers are staff that design and manage academic program for the faculty. In the context of this study, they are called curriculum designers. This section surveys their perceptions towards automation of curriculum design process and obstacles encountered by them during curriculum design process specifically in the area of constructive alignment. When a curriculum requires redesigning or reviewing under curriculum design process in the area of constructive alignment, curriculum designers need to revisit the alignment process. Under OBE, several principles of constructive alignment are applied. Curriculum designers’ work out the alignment matrix to ensure the intended learning outcomes (ILO) which are programme educational objectives (PEO), programme learning outcomes (PLO), and course learning outcomes (CLO), TLAs and assessment are aligned. Alignment matrix is used as a guide to the alignment process by all the curriculum designers

interviewed in this study. A sample of alignment matrix is shown in table 2. According to a curriculum designer who has had 10 years of experience in curriculum design, the most challenging aspects of curriculum design is the setting of the program objectives and mapping them to three domains of Bloom’s taxonomy which are: Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor domains [12]. As mentioned in the literature study, specifying verbs are important in constructive alignment. Based on the GGP:CDD [8] learning outcomes verbs are used in each domain of Bloom’s taxonomy and they range from simple to complex. If the mapping process of curriculum/program objectives is automated, it will be time saving as it minimizes cross checking of the guidelines provided by the objectives set. Furthermore, the said curriculum designer prefers a flexible and dynamic web-based system that accommodates and adapts to regular changes made by the national regulatory body. Based on an interview with another curriculum designer who is also the dean of IT faculty and has had 8 years of experience in designing and managing curriculum, it is gathered that the current mechanism of reviewing curriculum of his faculty in the area of constructive alignment is as follows: the process begins with the aligning of body of knowledge to the computing guidelines (in the context of Malaysia it is computing program standard guidelines provided by MQA [11]). It is then followed by aligning PEO, PLO and CLO manually. At present, he keeps track of the PLO and CLO to determine their relationship and how PLO are achieved over time. The challenges that he faced are whenever there are top-level educational goal changes, it must be reflected at course level. Therefore, the statistics of CLO achieved need to be revised manually. Automating the entire alignment process will reduce human error, human efforts and time. The automation will also bring in consistency during the entire curriculum process. A web-based system is preferred by this interviewee to assist the tedious work done by the curriculum designers. Being a head of IT department, this curriculum designer who has had 3 years experience in curriculum design found aligning assessment components with CLO the most challenging task for him. The biggest constraint for him is aligning the final examination to the right assessment component. Using assessment matrix manually consumed much time and it is a tedious process. TLAs become a tedious and time consuming task as every course with different credit hours and learning activities requires alignment process. For example, a 3 credit hours subject requires at least 120 notional hours of student learning time (SLT) according to the guidelines given in GGP:CDD [8]. The current software tool used by the interviewee’s institution to assist in calculating notional hours for SLT for each topic covered in the course is Microsoft Excel. The next challenge faced by this head of department is the number of courses which contribute to cognitive, affective

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and psychomotor domains, that need done manually to avoid missing components during the design process. A web-based system with a knowledge portal is his preferred choice of tool to assist him in his curriculum design work. A senior lecturer shared the view of that cross checking of programme objectives is time consuming during design process as TLAs, assessment and objectives have to be aligned in the curriculum. A dean of 7 years of experience in curriculum design commented that the current mechanism is not flexible and shared the same concern. He is concern that this design work needs to be repeated every time fresh and young designers join his faculty and training of these young designers takes up most of his time as most work is done manually. In a nutshell, there is a lack of usage of automated system in supporting curriculum design process among CoP. Changing format/requirements by national regulatory body is tedious work that can’t be avoided over time. Due to human error, there might also be discrepancies in aligning PLO and CLO by two different curriculum designers to the same piece of work. This problem can be overcome by a web-based system with intelligent components.

III. DISCUSSION Curriculum designers shared the same view and concern even though they are from different backgrounds and IHLs. Regardless of their experience in curriculum design specifically in the area of constructive alignment, they are concern about the consistency and compliance issues during the design process. According to Habib and Samia (2009), as mentioned in literature review, the web-based engine incorporates several important features, allowing verification of the proposed curriculum coherence and the generation of statistics necessary for academic and accreditation purpose [6]. It is hoped the application of some of the common features in the existing tools used in the market will not only help to automate the design process, but also address the concerns raised by them in section II.

IV. CONCLUSION

Curriculum design is one of the important phases in the curriculum development process. Nevertheless, using traditional approach in performing this task is time consuming and error-prone. This paper has determined the perception of curriculum designers towards automation of curriculum design process in IHL. It also presents the obstacles and issues that raised without the use of automated tool to support and assist their work. Future work can be conducted to tackle more challenging issues such as how to design an automated system, which can improve effectiveness and efficiency in curriculum design.

REFERENCES [1] Thong, C.L., Yusmadi ,Y. J., Rusli, A. , Nur, H. A. and Lee, K.C. (2011). Identifying Difficulties in Curriculum Design for Institution of Higher Learning in Malaysia. Proceedings of Academic Development Higher Education Conference 2011, Nov 2-4 (2011)  [2] Wallace H. Wulfeck II, Janet L. Dickieson, James Apple and Jerry L. Vogt (1993). The Automation of Curriculum Development Using the Authoring Instructional Material (AIM) System. Instructional Science 21: 255-267 (1993). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. Pp 255-167. [3] Charles, P. Friedman. Issues ad Challenges in the Design of Curriculum Information Systems (1995). Academic Medicine, Vol. 70, No. 12/December 1995. [4] Floyd A. Wikes, David W. Johnson and Pat Ormond (2005). Is a Curriculum Management System in Your Future? [5] Joshua, J., Albert, S., Terri C., Gwen, N., and Richard, K. (2005). Implementing An Online Curriculum Management Database in Problem-Based Learning Curriculum. Academic Medicine, Vol. 80, No. 9/September 2005. [6] Habib, H. and Samia, L. (2009). Web-Based Engine for Program Curriculum Designers. IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. 52, No.4, November 2009.  [7] Johnson, D. Wilkes, F., Ormond, P. and Figueroa, R. Adding Value to the IS’ 97..Curriculum Models. Journal of Information Systems Education, May 2002, Vol. 13, Number 2 [8] Malaysian Qualification Agency (2010). Guidelines of Good Practices: Curriculum Design and Delivery. Panel of Experts, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur [9] Biggs, J. B. (2011). Academic: Constructive Alignment. Available:http://www.johnbiggs.com.au/constructive_alignment .html 10] McNamara and Carter (1999). General Guidelines for Conducting Interviews. Minnesota, 1999 [11] MQA Council (2009). Programme Standards For Computing. Approved by the MQA Council on 28th April 2009. [12] Benjamin S. Bloom. Taxonomy of Education Objectives. Published by Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA. Copyright © 1984 by Pearson Education. Available: http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learning/exams/blooms-taxonomy.html

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No. SEM COURSE CODE

COURSE NAME CREDIT HOURS

Kno

wle

dge

Prac

tical

Sk

ills

Prob

lem

Sol

ving

A

nd S

cien

tific

Ski

lls

Com

mun

icat

ion,

Le

ader

ship

and

Tea

m

Skill

s

Soci

al

Skill

s an

d R

espo

nsib

ilitie

s V

alue

s, A

ttitu

des

and

Prof

essi

onal

ism

Info

rmat

ion

Man

agem

ent

and

Life

ling

Lear

ning

Sk

ills

Man

ager

ial

and

Entre

pren

euria

l Ski

lls

1 I TLA0622 Al-Lughah Al-Arabiyyah I

4 √ √ √ √ √

2 I TPA0063 Sirah and Islamic History 3 √ √ 3 I TPA0044 Dirasat Nahwiyyah Wa

Sarifiyyah 4 √ √ √ √ √

4 I TPA0013 Tafsir Wa Ulum-Quran 4 √ √ √ √ √ √ 5 I TPA0032 Tajwid Wa Tilawah 4 √ √ √ √ 6 I TLE0014 English Language I 4 √ √ √ √ √ √ 7 I TCL0822 ICT Skills 2 √ √ √ √ √ √ 8 II TLA0632 Al-Lughah- Al-

Arabbiyyah II 4 √ √ √ √ √

9 II TPA0023 Tauhid Wa Akhlak 3 √ √ √ √ √ 10 II TPA0093 Balaghah 3 √ √ √ √ √ 11 II TPA0053 Al Madkhal ila Dirassat

Al Adab Arabi 3 √ √ √ √ √

12 II TPA0084 I’jaz Al-Quran 4 √ √ √ √ √ √ 13 II TPA0074 Hadith Wa Ulum Hadith 4 √ √ √ √ √ √ 14 II TLE0024 English Language II 4 √ √ √ √ √ √

Table 2: A Sample of Mapping of MQF Learning Outcome Domain to Modules/Courses Course Title: TAMHIDI PENGAJIAN ISLAM DAN BAHASA ARAB

Source: Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) (2009), “Tamhidi Pengajian Islam Dan Bahasa Arab.” (Extracted from: Malaysian Qualification Agency (2010). Guidelines of Good Practices: Curriculum Design and Delivery. Panel of Experts, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur)

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