Curriculum design & the curriculum lifecycle

• 3 min read

Curriculum designCurriculum design for the corporation

Thanks to the broad adoption of the ‘Corporate University’ as a concept, commonly used terms in education such as ‘curriculum design’ are now being used by corporate trainers and HR.

It ought to be obvious why we need to consider how to design curricula for corporate employees – lifelong learning is the only way to succeed in the modern market and a training strategy that guides employees throughout their careers is essential.

When you go through the vast amount of information available on curriculum design, you can easily understand that a curriculum is more than just a set of courses: i.e it’s more than the sum its parts! Much like a degree is more than just the sum of the individual exams that make it up. When a learner is at the end of a corporate curriculum s/he has achieved different learning goals and a new professional status (that will open up new job opportunities within the company).

A curriculum within a company is a journey that will automatically improve employee performance in the same role – or open up a new one.

In the last ten years we have seen huge market growth for web tools that help both institutions and the corporate sector manage curriculum design. In fact it is well recognized that curriculum design is a very work intensive activity (in terms of planning, designing, executing) that benefits from technologies such as web tools for training administrators and/or trainers.

Learning Management Systems are recognized nowadays as the best tools not only to design curricula but also manage them. LMSs are neutral with respect to the content covered by a curriculum and as a consequence a company can use the same LMS to design and manage all types of curricula. LMSs aren’t designed for any specific curricula (in a particular field)

Designing a curriculum

A curriculum is a structured path of learning activities that a learner has to go through in order to get a specific certification or qualification.

A learning activity could be an online course, a face to face session, a social learning activity, an evaluation session, a videoconference or a single studying assignment.

By taking each scheduled activity a learner accomplishes a specific learning task linked to a single (or more than one) content item. Often the entire set of contents covered by a curriculum are structured as a syllabus (an outline and summary of topics to be covered in an education or training course).

A curriculum is a set of learning activities organized to complete a syllabus in order to achieve a learning goal (or a set of learning goals).

The curriculum lifecycle

When in the context of education, a curriculum lifecycle is phased out and ends at a defined point, whereas within the context of corporate learning the curriculum has a recurring lifecycle. Why? Because in the corporation the requirement to assess, evolve and evaluate lasts an entire ‘work life’.

curriculum lifecycle

The circular and overlapping scheme in the above diagram has many methodological implications even during the curriculum design phase (the availability of content/s for reuse in the re-developing phase, the relationship between content and learning goals, autonomy of the single learning activity and so on). But it’s self evident that a web tool for curriculum design has to also cover management needs!

List of required features for a web tool when building a curriculum  

When choosing a tool to help build a curriculum for your trainees do check that it has the following features:

  • support for all methodological approaches (from self-paced learning to collaboration)
  • strong assessment tool
  • learning path design and management
  • external training activities tracking
  • certificates management

An LMS such as Docebo LMS has all of these features and is particularly strong in the curriculum management phase. If you’d like to check out how Docebo manages curriculum you can try a 14-day free trial.