Abstract:

"With labour markets increasingly relying on higher skill levels and transversal competences, higher education should equip students with the advanced knowledge, skills and competences they need through their professional lives.“ (The Bologna Process 2020) This paradigm change from teacher based, input oriented to student and output centered is still in progress. The core of competence-based curriculum design is to ensure that learners will be able to demonstrate their learned competences after they have acquired a necessary combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Modern teaching design should incorporate a large number of influencing factors in a common whole. From the European perspective, this includes the consideration of the European educational frameworks, which have been formulated in a number of different declarations and initiatives, like the Bologna declaration and Bologna 2020, the Dublin descriptors or the European Qualification Framework. Often national legislature defines an additional qualification framework and university regulations set a strict, well defined frame. Modern teaching design should be based on student centered learning activities and should be assessed output oriented, the classical lectures and written exams need to be thoroughly overhauled and additional activities need to be set up, making the design of learning activities a difficult task. Last but not least, the requirements of the future alumni and their employers need to be taken into account as modern universities should produce employable students.

The current paper demonstrates a step for step procedure. The process starts with the definition of competences, continues with the setup of a competence catalogue and matrix, deriving learning objectives and activities from this matrix and finally suggests how evaluation of all competences could be possible, even when they are taught in different courses simultaneously. It provides a clear and structured framework which can be used for the design of different curricula for different disciplines, covering all relevant steps and taking relevant stakeholders into account. This procedure clearly integrates the above elements into a common whole.

Keywords:

Competence, Teaching, Curriculum Design, Student oriented, Output centred.