Abstract:

Higher education institutions (HEI) are the cornerstone of future prosperity and the catalyst of tomorrow’s green and digital economy. However, the vulnerability of HEIs to unexpected crisis events was starkly illustrated by the Covid-19 crisis. Organisational resilience is understood as the capacity to prepare, adapt and learn from challenging circumstances impacting organisations. It necessitates latent and manifest organisational capacities and employee capabilities. At the cornerstone of these manifest organisational capacities is HEIs’ curriculum and their properties.

A questionnaire was sent to university members of an European project in April 2024 with the aim to probe the properties of a resilient curriculum. It consisted of 23 questions both quantitative and qualitative and a total number of 35 respondents. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) institutions represented 2/3 of the HEIs and among the respondents half of them (18) had a good practice of curriculum design (that is designed themselves to be a leader or to have participated more than once in a curriculum design process). Twenty respondents had some expertise with resilience concepts and 12 declared themselves to have both participated in curriculum design and have a good expertise in resilience.

Drivers of curriculum resilience found in the literature were tested on a numerical scale from 1 to 5. All drivers were shown to be significantly contributing to resilience. Among these were, various types of redundancy factors, flexibility, standardizing and simplifying the curriculum structure and different types of continuous adaptation. A few open questions with textual feedback allowed us to gather additional insights characterizing more precisely the properties of a resilient curriculum.

Notably, other redundancy factors given by respondents were: availability of teachers in each topic, redundancy of computer system, redundancy of learner strategies employed in learning.

For the structure of curriculum, respondents indicated the following factors: adaptability, scalability, modularity, accessibility, interdisciplinarity, flexibility, technology integration, feedback mechanisms, sustainability, collaborative elaboration , clear interrelation between building blocks, clear designation of materials/learning objectives, better readability by students and interchangeable modules across programs.

For flexibility and other drivers of flexibility, respondents suggested customizable learning paths, flexibility in learning formats and hybrid learning models, dynamic content update mechanisms, adaptable modes of teaching and assessment and curriculum that can adapt to the changing needs, interests, and abilities of the students and the learning environment.

Keywords:

Resilient curriculum, Curriculum Design, Quantitative and qualitative analyses, European project.