Conceptual Integrity in Web-Inclusive Curriculum Design

Ellis, R. A., Institute of Teaching & Learning, University of Sydney, NSW 2006. Email: r.ellis@itl.usyd.edu.au
Calvo, R., Levy, D. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Sydney
Kay, J., Kummerfeld, R.J., Department of Computer Science, University of Sydney

Abstract

University curricula design is a complex process that has become increasingly so with the introduction of online components. These components may supplement, complement or replace the face-to-face curriculum elements in campus-based student learning experiences. This paper discusses two case studies adopting contrasting approaches and the strategies they use to ensure they maintain conceptual integrity in relation to their learning outcomes. By doing so, the paper provides important insight into the relationship between the key elements of curriculum design that can provide a guide to colleagues engaging in similar activities.

Introduction

The term “conceptual integrity” has been adopted by software engineers to differentiate programming systems [Brooks, 1995]. Programming systems that have it reflect one cohesive set of design ideas and have eradicated all extraneous ones. Those that do not have it are programs that may have many good ideas, but they remain independent or uncoordinated. Programming systems that do not have conceptual integrity undermine one of their primary goals, to make computer-use easy. The same concept can be applied to curriculum design.

The term “conceptual integrity” when it is applied to curriculum design, implies an alignment between the key elements of a curriculum: aims, teaching methods, assessment processes, and learning outcomes [Biggs, 1999]. Curricula that have conceptual integrity can be said to have alignment amongst these key elements. In other words, the elements are designed in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of students achieving the learning outcomes. Curricula that do not have alignment, undermine the goal of helping students achieve the learning outcomes. An aligned curriculum is represented by figure 1.

Figure 1 – Some Key Elements of Curriculum Design

When curriculum design includes online components, the complexity of the alignment issues increase. Curriculum designers have the challenge of ensuring that the online teaching methods and assessment processes are consistent with any face-to-face elements, and also support the learning outcomes. Consequently the process of aligning the elements requires additional attention and scrutiny as the greater choice of teaching methods and assessment processes offered by the online components increases the risk of misalignment.

Conceptual integrity of curricula has not been a feature that has been foregrounded in the extensive literature on curriculum design. Designing curricula to help students apply their knowledge in a range of contexts (Villegas, 1986), to appropriately situate multiple choice questions in relation to objectives (Lister, 2001) and to make use of the Web resources in different pedagogical approaches (Burnett, 1999) are some examples of the wide range of related researched. There has been some more closely related research looking at alignment amongst contributors to the curriculum development process (McBeath & Atkinson, 1992), and the integrity of content of topics when new topics are added to existing curricula (Toll, 1998), but this has focused more on the process and content than on the learning outcomes.
There is no one way to ensure the conceptual integrity of web-inclusive curricula design. However, by considering case studies and abstracting important principles, useful guidelines can be identified that can help to articulate a quality process that can reduce the chance of misalignment. The following discusses two approaches to web-inclusive curricula design that offer contrasting perspectives on how to engage in the process. From these case studies, important knowledge of how to go about web-inclusive curriculum design processes is revealed.

A Top-Down Perspective on Curriculum Design – Electronic Commerce

Achieving conceptual integrity amongst the curriculum elements of a second year Electronic Commerce course at the University of Sydney Australia was a challenging process. To take advantage of a growing professional and continuing education market, the University favors flexible curricula that can support students both at a distance in professional contexts, and on campus for undergraduates. The curriculum design originally included traditional learning situations of lectures and tutorials. Since the final outcome of the curriculum redesign process was to be a course that could be delivered completely online for external students, or partially online (about 50%) for campus-based students, the notions of lectures and tutorials were set aside and a single learning outcome was chosen to orientate the curriculum design. The top-down approach to the curriculum design was an e-commerce project specification document that outlined a student’s solution to an e-commerce problem.

The top-down approach to web-inclusive curriculum design encouraged the course designers to reconceptualise the curriculum into four stages rather than twelve lectures and tutorials, which supported the students on their way to an e-commerce solution. The four stages were:

Fundamentals, in which the course puts the Internet in a historical context and then goes on to describing an e-commerce relationship between a business and client (requirement analyses, a project specification documentation and the like);
Business to customer (b2c), in which the main design issue addressed is the usability of the web service and the student learning outcome is a usability test plan.
Business to business (b2b), in which the main issue addressed in this chapter, is the way individuals and organizations exchange “objects”: information (XML and EDI), e-payment systems and physical products. The learning outcome for this stage is the description of the e-payment system to be used in the project.
Business to employee (b2e). This stage addresses web based systems that produce organizational change such as knowledge management.. Students design an online training/development program that would help employees serve the needs of the customers.

The Curriculum Design of E-Commerce

The curriculum of the course Introduction to E-commerce can be represented by figure 2.

Figure 2 – A Visual Representation Of The Introduction To E-Commerce Curriculum

The top-down curriculum design approach adopted for the E-commerce curriculum uses a problem-based learning methodology [Kay and Kummerfeld, 1998] in which students identify an e-commerce website with a problem, and then specify the solution which includes the redesign of at least one of e-commerce website user-systems, b2c, b2b, b2e. The top-down approach of first defining a student learning outcome and then producing the curriculum components to support it, has a number of advantages. One of the advantages is that such a process promotes a high level of conceptual integrity. For example, to get a student to a stage of redesigning a b2c system, they first need an e-commerce website with an identifiable problem, they need access to knowledge about how to identify the problem and plan a usability test, they need to know how to use the information from the test to produce a solution for the client and then conceptualise this properly in their specification document. These needs determined the design of the online curriculum components.

The design of the online curriculum components departed from the students’ needs that were contingent on the learning outcomes they were expected to achieve. Taking one of the stages as an example, the b2c stage, the online learning components included:

a range of e-commerce websites which offered suitable problems for analysis
a variety of e-commerce resources which provided knowledge about e-commerce payment systems, security, policy development and the like that would offer suggestions for improvement
online multiple choice questions which tested the students’ understanding of the knowledge in the four stages of the curriculum described above
access to real usability tests to help guide the development of their own tests,
short design tasks, such as analysing badly designed pull-down menus, in order to reveal examples of how to suggest improvements
discussion forums designed to help students reveal their progress with their conceptualisation of the key concepts such as usability tests and project solutions [Clark, 2000].

The outcome from a combination of these learning processes is the submission of at least three major texts that identify the students’ choice of problem, the testing of the problem and the solution they design.

The top-down approach was not the first approach adopted by the professors. The first approach involved identifying written, graphic and multimedia content that needed to be produced in order to cover an assumed definition of the course. After this design stage, production of the course content began together with a description of the student projects. Since the learning outcomes, the student projects, were not very clearly defined, the content production process ran into difficulties. The content did not always support the outcomes. After identifying the problem, we found that it was more efficient to write the description of the student projects (the learning outcomes) and then think about the content. This changed the production process considerably and it had other positive spin-offs. For example, once the outcome requirements were well specified, it was much easier to find supporting material that could supplement the student learning experience without changing the vision of the course.

One problem that has not been satisfactorily solved is the production tool used in the curriculum design process. Surprisingly, it became apparent that the curriculum design approach adopted had some ramifications for the choice of tool. Since the curriculum had to serve both campus-based students and distance students, the media in which the students received course content was likely to differ (i.e. lecture, online, print). This need necessitated a tool that would be flexible enough to produce the course content in different media. Unfortunately, word processors that support the production of high quality print materials do not support the quality production of materials for web delivery. They typically do not support dynamic elements such as animations, and even if they support elements such as HTML, the output is often of a low quality. The same problem exists when web-editors or other web production tools were adopted. Web-editors will support high quality HTML and dynamic objects, but they do not provide a high quality formatting that word-processors facilitate. Consequently, there is some duplication of effort as the final choice of media determines the initial choice of design tool. In an attempt to solve this, we are looking at how specification of course content with XML may remove the problem of predetermining in which media the content is likely to be presented.

The E-commerce case study provides some useful insights into maintaining conceptual integrity in web-inclusive curricula design when using a top-down approach. Important insights include:

When engaging in a top-down approach to web-inclusive curriculum design, begin by identifying the learning outcome(s) for the whole course. Then decide how you would like to assess the learning outcome. Consider your assessment processes in the choice of your teaching methods and then determine the material required to successfully support students in the realization of the learning outcomes. Such a process will promote conceptual integrity amongst all components from aims to outcomes.
Depending on the needs of your learning context and the needs of your students, your choice of production tools is likely to be determined by the media in which you wish student to access the curriculum content. Assess the needs of your learning context (face-to-face, online or a mixture of both) before deciding which production tools will be used
Make the course content independent of the media used for delivery. This will provide the flexibility to allow the same content to be used in a variety of learning media. For example, the knowledge required by the students for the four stages of developing their e-commerce solution could be given to all students in hard copy, made available to distance students online, or be used as slides for lectures for campus students.

The above case study discusses how web-inclusive curriculum design using a top-down approach can achieve conceptual integrity. The following case study considers a contrasting approach to the web-inclusive curriculum design process of a first year undergraduate course at the University of Sydney.

A Bottom-Up Approach to Curriculum Design: User Interface Design & Programming

The challenge of achieving conceptual integrity in the design of another curriculum at the University of Sydney was significantly different from the E-commerce case study. It differed because the needs of the learning context suggested the adoption of a bottom-up approach to the web-inclusive curriculum design. The User Interface Design and Programming (UIDP) curriculum is a first year course whose learning outcomes centre around students being able to apply user-centred design approaches when constructing their own interfaces, including being able to design appropriate usability tests for interactive interfaces with an understanding of the theories that underpin them. In the process of designing their own interfaces, they have the opportunity to develop competencies in a range of programming tools.

For the UIDP curriculum, there was no intention to make it available in professional or continuing education contexts. Rather the face-to-face experience that could help the students achieve the final outcome, the design of a user-interface, was considered to be necessary. For this reason, the online learning components were conceptualised as a way of enhancing the quality of face-to-face learning experience, rather than trying to replace all of it. This was significantly different to the purpose of the E-commerce curriculum that sought to enable the entire curriculum to be experienced online.

The face-to-face elements of the curriculum originally included a 2 hour lecture and a 2 hour tutorial. They combined to help students move towards understanding the theoretical and practical complexities of creating user interfaces by prototyping different types using a range of tools including WWW forms, cgi scripting with Python, tk-python, a simple X-toolkit called GraphApp and Java-Swing. After completing a range of prototypes, students designed one of their own using the programming competencies and theoretical frameworks they had developed.

When deciding how to enhance the quality of the face-to-face learning experience of the curriculum, the professors decided to keep the tutorials because of their potential to be dynamic, interactive and student-centred, in ways which were very difficult, if not impossible to achieve in lectures. While the lectures were providing a useful forum for some of the curriculum teaching, the professors felt that by reconceptualising the knowledge they dealt with as online learning objects, the quality of the student learning experience could be enhanced.

The Curriculum Design of UIDP

Designing the online learning objects required careful and sensitive curriculum alignment to ensure that the conceptual integrity of the overall curriculum was maintained. Since the tutorials were to remain, the learning outcomes of each of the online learning objects had to align with the overall learning outcomes of the tutorials as well as the final exam and project. This alignment can be visually represented as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3 – A Visual Representation Of The User Interface Design and Programming Curriculum

The online learning objects were made up of powerpoint slides, audio streaming and other digital resources. Each object dealt with a specific concept whose learning outcome aligned with the aims of the face-to-face tutorials, the knowledge examined in the final exam and the practical work that was assessed. For example, within the topic of Web-programming, four online learning objects were designed, each dealing with one of the related concepts of html, www forms, cgi, java. Each of these provided students with an opportunity to learn about the theoretical frameworks and potential applications of the programming tools, as well as how that knowledge applied in their practical work in the face-to-face tutorials. Students received feedback on the learning objects through the tutorials as they engaged in the prototyping development process and from short quizzes. This knowledge was formatively assessed during the course of their practical work and summatively assessed in the student-designed Interface Project and their final exam. By designing each online learning object so its learning outcome matched the desired learning outcomes of the tutorials, practical work and final exam, the professors ensured that all the curriculum elements were aligned and that the conceptual integrity of the web-inclusive curriculum design was maintained.

There were learning advantages provided by the online learning objects for both student and teacher. Students were able to choose the pace at which they went through the material. They had more control over the pace of the learning process because the online learning objects allowed them to retrace and revise material immediately or at a later date, such as around exam times. Students were able to choose when and where they accessed the material. This control over the learning process contributes towards the development of independent learning skills. By giving the students choice over when they engaged with the knowledge, they were expected to accept responsibility for their learning. The learning objects also allowed the professors to engage with students in some of the tutorials. In previous versions of the curriculum, the lectures were delivered by the professors which meant that teaching assistants were the only facilitators in the tutorials. By moving the lectures online, the professors had time to attend various tutorials to provide more individual attention to students.

The UIDP case study provides some useful insights into maintaining conceptual integrity in web-inclusive curricula design when using a bottom-up approach. Important insights include:

When engaging in a bottom-up approach to web-inclusive curriculum design, consider how online learning components can supplement, complement or replace a portion of the existing curriculum. In the UIDP curriculum, the lecturers decided to replace the lectures in order to improve the quality of the student learning experience. The online learning objects provided more control to the students and freed up the professors to give individual students more attention in the tutorials.
When designing curricula with online learning components that are used alongside face-to-face situations, use a variety of strategies to embed them in the course. In the UIDP curriculum, the students were expected to complete quizzes and prototypes in the tutorials based on knowledge they learnt from the online learning objects.
Even though curriculum designers may have ensured conceptual integrity amongst the online and face-to-face elements of a course, if students do not engage with all of the elements, then their learning experience is not likely to be a quality experience. Despite the integration of the online learning objects in the UIDP curriculum, not all students completed the online learning processes. When including online components in the curriculum, build in formative testing processes online so that students recognise the importance of their contribution to the learning experience. In future versions of the UIDP curriculum, additional online formative assessment strategies, such as mind-mapping exercises and multiple choice questions will be considered.

Conclusions

Curriculum design is a complex process, requiring the alignment of a myriad of teaching and learning processes, assessment procedures, aims, and learning outcomes in order to provide a quality learning experience for students. When online learning components are included in the design process, the danger of misalignment and a lack of conceptual integrity increases. In the above case studies the conceptual integrity of the curricula was dependent on:

The needs of the institution: The University values both campus-based learning experience for its students as well as flexible curricula for professional contexts. Thus the UIDP curriculum was designed for it to be experienced only partially online while the E-commerce curriculum design ensured it could be experienced completely online.
The needs of the professors: The professors in the UIDP curriculum used the online components to achieve greater time-freedom so that they could interact with the students in the tutorials. The professors of the E-commerce curriculum required the curriculum to support both students studying at a distance and students studying on campus.
The needs of the students: The UIDP curriculum provided the students with the benefits of both online learning to give them some responsibility and control over their learning, as well as the face-to-face tutorials which provided them with a personal contact with other students, teaching assistants and professors. The E-commerce curriculum enabled students in professional and continuing education contexts to complete the learning outcomes online, thus providing them with learning opportunities that would not otherwise been possible for them.
The learning outcomes of the curricula: The main learning outcome of the UIDP curriculum, the student-designed User Interface, suggested that it would be best to retain the tutorials and move the lectures online, whilst ensuring that the content of the online learning objects supported students in the development of the User-Interface Project. The learning outcome of the E-commerce necessitated the adoption of a main learning outcome, the Project Specification Document, which could be holistically achieved by students with only the support of online learning processes and resources.

Conceptual integrity in web-inclusive curricula design is a challenge for even experienced professors. There is no one way to achieve it. The above case studies have revealed some of the fundamental issues involved in a web-inclusive curriculum design process and their relationship to the needs of the institution, professors, students and learning outcomes of the curricula. An awareness of the nature and complexity of these relationships can only help others involved in similar processes.

References

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Copyright

R.A.Ellis, R.Calvo, D.Levy, J.Kay, R.J.Kummerfeld © 2000. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.