Abstract:

Curriculum design is a concretionary and explicit process that defines, clearly and structurally, the way by which the elements involved in the learning process act simultaneously. Its rationale must satisfy a relevant or pertinent society needs. In that sense, it must be flexible, open to critique and changes, that means that it must be developed taking into consideration the society context, and culture.

The challenge for Universities is to propose an educational project that reflects the general guidelines established in the curriculum design; that complies with local, regional and global demands, focusing on the pertinent needs of a developing society.

On this context, it is needed to set a methodology that guides the development and assessment of new curriculum projects and/or redesign the current curricula, that considers a continuous updating that must be done in a living document.

The aim of this paper is to propose a Curriculum Design Methodology for a new under graduated or graduated program that covers each necessary stage which includes the study of being a pertinent, and curriculum development and assessment. The proposed methodology identifies easily macro, meso and micro curriculum. For this project, National Polytechnic School was chosen as a study case, because Ecuador is going through a changing process related to higher education, based on a new Ecuadorian academic system regulation, which is the reference to develop of this work.

This proposal responds to the question “Which should be the stages that a university must take to develop a relevant curriculum?”.

The design, development and assessment of a curriculum based on academic quality standards were defined and the elements that should be part of it were analyzed. Once the state of art was gather, an appropriate process to develop these components was defined, taking into account, the National Polytechnic School academic culture and the new Ecuadorian academic system regulation.

As a result of this study, a methodology was developed including:
• Identification of each stage needed for the curriculum design and assessment
• Internal processes systemization for each defined stage
• Conceptualization of obtained products

This proposal becomes a contribution to the development of pertinent curricular projects in a coherent, logical and comprehensive way, based on a feedback and continuous assessment process.

Keywords:

Curriculum, methodology, learning outcomes.