This is the big picture. You are graduating students with a specific set of knowledge and skills. There will be skills related to the acquisition of knowledge and regurgitation, skills related to applying recipe-like processes, and there will be the deeper intellectual capabilities associated with the various levels of the Bloom taxonomies; cognitive processes and cognitive complexity. These skills and use of knowledge will be different by faculty, department and program. That much is obvious. This note provides a high level perspective of how to approach a program design.



There are two versions of the program design activity; a new program and a program review and revision. Both are similar in many ways, but different in some.

If the program is brand spanking new, there will be more assumptions made and more looking elsewhere for ideas. If the activity is a review or revision, there is the past and existing that can be used to inform the review and any possible re-design activity. Other programs at other comparable institutions can also provide insights.

In both cases, there should be a clear picture of what you want the students to be capable of when they graduate; the knowledge and skills. This view should include initial usage of the skills and knowledge upon graduation and for the first few years after graduation. You are not just preparing the students for the time immediately after graduation, but also providing them the starting knowledge and skills that will help them in their career progression during the first few years. You should not be focusing on those students you would love to see as a graduate student – you need to address the educational needs of the 80-90%, not just the elite.

You need to have a program that has three tenets: i) support the present, ii) provide the tools for the alumni to evolve themselves and their practice of your field, and iii) create the discipline specific foundations for future growth – the new ideas from research, “best practice”, that might inspire or open up opportunities for the alumni.

In the existing case, or if there are exemplars, you can try to survey and find out what the existing, recent alumni have experienced. Of course, you are not 100% focused on what they are doing and constrained to replicating that, but you should be aware of what you have been teaching and what value that has (or has not) generated. If you are creating a new, innovative program for which there are no exemplars, you will need to have meetings with the targeted ‘market’ to ensure that you are designing a program for which there is a need, or that there will be a need in the imminent future.

If one was to use an growth mindset using a problem solving stratgy, you must define the requirements and desired outcomes (skills and knowledge) and then consciously design the program to deliver those skills. You should not teach topics just because they have been taught for many decades. You should not teach topics just because they are a fad. You should not teach topics just because you did your graduate studies on the topic, and you think it is neat, exciting and that everyone should know it and do it. You should design programs based on empirical data and make it outcomes based.

There also has to be feedback and possible program design adjustments. The program design or revision might have unrealistic expectations or create situations that need to be phased in. The program design cannot be a concrete, inflexible structure and must recognize the infeasible and impractical.

If you are interested in some of the historic views and some very relevant points to consider, we suggest that you read Tyler (1957) on curriculum design. It is focused on the secondary level, but we think most of the points, almost all, are also relevant to post-secondary!

Thoughts…

• You should start with knowing what skills, levels of skill, and knowledge that you want the majority of the students to have upon graduation.
• Use phrases like: we want 80% of the students to do xxx in 80% of the cases at a level of 80% acceptable performance. This should set reasonable and feasible targets!
• You should list the skills and knowledge domains out. Do not rely on verbal dialog. Document it. This will allow you to revisit list in the future when reviewing outcomes and program performance.
• You need to use a general consensus approach. You will never get 100% of the faculty to agree on anything (except in very rare cases). If 60% of the faculty approve or agree, the others need to be mature, defer, and get on board. Yes, we know it is difficult for some faculty to be mature and defer to others, but folks have to try.
• Once you have the list and requirements, you can use various techniques to work backwards. What are the ‘causes’ that will result in the ‘effects’ you wish. For example, you can use the KJ method, cause & effect diagrams described in the cause and effect note, or other methods to work backwards and deal with the program; layer by layer. You should not do a helter skelter approach to deciding; it should be orderly and thought through. We should teach this then, this other topic then, etc.
• It is doubtful that a large gaggle of faculty members meeting via a special one-two day retreat will derive a suitable program. You do not design a program in a day or via a large group of geese squawking. A suitable working group should be struck to figure out the requirements and have the faculty first agree on this. Three to five individuals should be sufficient. Then the same, or perhaps a different working group should take a run at laying out the program. These requirements and program analyses can then be shared with the department. During these meetings, care should taken to avoid the types of biases noted by Kahneman et al. (2021).
• The program design needs to consider vertical and horizontal scaffolding, leading up to the desired outcomes. Vertical scaffolding is relatively easy to do and instructors in term nn should know what was taught in nn-1 and how their material will be used in nn+1. Horizontal scaffolding is when two courses work together in the same term to leverage commonalities and achieve a 1+1=3 situation. This is where the two courses can reinforce and send complementary messaging (methods, skills, knowledge). This is difficult to do and to sustain and should not be assumed to be easy.
• Do not teach material too early. Do not expect students to retain outcomes from two or more terms prior. If you teach xxx in term nn, then it should be used in term nn+1.
• Use the first year course to lay the basic foundations for the skills needed and provide the students a glimpse of what will be coming and how subjects and ideas work together.

Co-dependencies & The Necessary and Hopefully Sufficient

• Without having a clear concept of what the graduating students should know (the knowledge base) and the cognitive skills needed to use the knowledge (the comprehension, ability to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate) in unstructured problem solving, it is not likely that the program will be as good as it could be or should be. Yes, it takes effort and takes time, but a program level design or review is worth it. It is possible to design a program without doing this, it appears that there are enough examples of this, but it is not a professional approach to the problem.
• The program must be designed from the outcomes and final year, going backwards towards first year. The sequence is important. It is like pulling work through a factory versus pushing work into it. This also helps figure out if the program will actually work. If you get back to first year and have run out of terms and course slots, you will have to rework the plan, perhaps even to the point of addressing the goals of the program. For a program to work, the amount of work, the placement of knowledge and skill development must make sense.
• The working groups must have the ability to do the requirements and design tasks. Else, there will be many naïve and amateurish mistakes made – those that will be found in hindsight, ‘it was a good idea at the time’. As with many trades or professions, just because you can practice the trade, does not mean that you can design it. For example, there are many software developers who can code and do technical gymnastics with a language or library, but who really cannot design a program, let alone design a subsystem or system, or conjure up an architecture. Just because an instructor can teach a subject does not mean that the instructor will be suitable for larger tasks such as program design or review. In some cases, it might be necessary to bring in a reviewer or helper from another school or department, or even a consultant who is used to doing requirements analysis and scaffolded processes.
• Another requirement is the time allocated and allowed for the task. A program is a big thing – either new or review. Often, the outcomes are short changed and the majority of time is spent on the nuances of a topic, the swapping of courses between two terms, who will teach what. If the topic should not be taught in the first place, why discuss it? The design and analysis of a program will likely take months to sort out if you are going to be serious about it.
• The venue is also critical. Large meetings are not the place to solve problems. Any serious problem cannot be solved in this way. A problem can be identified, and then it should be tasked and ‘solved’ outside of the meeting space. It is unlikely that a program can be well designed or reviewed in a retreat. If all of the department voices are desired, individual, independent submissions can be made; noting the strengths, weaknesses, suggested improvements and the working committee can bring it all together. There is little value having a big free-for-all.
• Personal biases and beliefs must be managed. The courses might be needed for those going on to graduate school, but must all students take them? Multiple courses on a theme or idea might be nice to design and teach, but if the alumni never really use the material upon graduation, are multiple courses really needed to convey the foundation concept? Why not one course? An instructor might believe that several courses are needed on a topic; why? Is it opinion only? What is the empirical evidence? Is the information biased by a few, elite alumni, or the masses? There are also the quiet and passive instructors and there are those with egos and strong personalities. All will come out to play when designing a program and these must be managed in a diplomatic and positive way.
• We suggest that periodic surveys of alumni are conducted. The surveys can look at what they do upon graduation and which learning outcomes are actually used directly or indirectly. This is very important input for any program review.

Further reading

• Tyler, R.W. (1957). The Curriculum - Then and Now, The Elementary School Journal, 57, 7, pp. 364-374.
• O’Neill, G. (2015). Curriculum Design in Higher Education: Theory to Practice, Dublin: UCD Teaching & Learning. ISBN 9781905254989 http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/UCDTLP0068.pdf
• Mizikaci, F. (2006). A systems approach to program evaluation model for quality in higher education, Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 37-53. https://doi.org/10.1108/09684880610643601
• Kahneman, D., Sibony, O. and C.R. Sunstein (2021) Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Little, Brown, Spark.