CURRICULUM DESIGN

The Integration of Curriculum Design, Instructional Design and Media Choice

Sanne Djikstra

By : Metty Asima Panggabean

Masda Saragih, S. Pd

The biography of Sanne Djikstra

Emeritus Professor of Instructional Technology in The Faculty of Behavioral Sciences at The University of
Twente, The Netherlands. She studies the changing relationship between science technology and society
from a communication perspective.

In general, the curriculum consists of the knowledge and skills that teachers are teaching. However this
is only a small part of all information and methods that are available for human beings. Moreover, the
information and methods change and increase regularly.

CURRICULUM

Knowledge Skills

TEACHER
The development of knowledge

For a substantial part, the development of knowledge is a social process. Human beings of all ages
discuss their assumptions and hypotheses with others and try to find support for them. In the
development and verification of scientific knowledge, this social process became controlled by accepted
rules, such as isolation of objects, careful observation of changes, discussion with colleagues, logical
reasoning and publication of results that are integrated in the task the research workers do.

The first milestone is the organization of scientist and students into guilds that led to the
establishment of universities which started in the 12 th century in Italy, France and England. In the next 4
centuries, the organizational model of this institution and the structure of the curriculum were copied in
all European countries.

Italy

France
Universities
England

A second milestone in the organization of scientist was the establishment of academies of science,
mainly in the beginning of the 17th century. These were strongly related to the national governments
and rulers. Gradually the national language took over the task which thus far had been done in the Latin
language.

Latin National Language

A third milestone was the release of the first two scientific journals in 1665 by members of academic
of science, one in France, Le Journal des Scavants and one in England, Philosophy Transactions. These
journals started to publish articles on experiments in the sciences, book reviews, and information that
were supposed to be relevant for the community of scientists.

Journalss

Le Journal des Scavants Philosophy Transactions

A fourth milestone was the substantial funding of scientific work by monarchs and national
governments. Not only the funding of the universities as such, but also special activities such as the
voyages of discovery and the determination of living organisms were paid for.

The fifth milestone is the development of the experimental method and of the technical devices
that allowed better observations reality and made the test of predictions of future events possible.
These developments in the 17th century were crucial for the development of the empirical sciences and
their applications.

Experimental method

Development

Technical devices

The result of all the scientific work was and is a tremendous increase in new knowledge and skills which
all should be stored in libraries, real or virtual. Moreover the increase in information and methods often
replaces existing concepts and theories.

Goals of education and curriculum design

The general goal of education is the impartment, preservation and renewal of a culture for those
who belong to it. A first sub goal for individual human beings and for families and their representatives
(in parliaments and churches). A second sub goal human beings have is to transmit their knowledge and
skills to members of future generations and to prepare the members of those generations to adapt
themselves to the demands of the natural and public reality in which they live. To realize these goals
curriculum will be designed.

Curriculum

Curriculum is a plan to realize a goal of education that prescribes (a) the content of the information
and problem – solving methods of a domain (b) the objectives the students should reach in the
cognitive, affective and motor domains and (c) the sequence in which these can be learned by students
of a certain group in an estimated period of time. A curriculum has to be designed. The rationales of
curriculum design include assumptions about characteristics of the group of learners involved, public or
societal requirements and features of the subjects.

1. An ideal curriculum is that which a scientist who works at the frontier of a domain and who is
reflecting on how students of secondary and tertiary education can acquire the newly
knowledge , can imagine as valuable and useful
 2. A written curriculum is a document that specifies the learning goal, the content of the
domain involved, the exam requirements and the criteria the achievements has to meet. The
written curriculum can be more or less detailed. It varies from a global description such as in an
official document of a government to the actual text-and exercise books.
3. The interpreted curriculum is the teachers’ interpretation of the written curriculum
document.
4. The executed curriculum comprises the way the teachers structure the content, provide
information and describe the problems the students should solve.
5. The evaluated curriculum represents the students’ achievement as measured by exams ,
formal tests and attitude questionnaires.

Curriculum designers have to solve the problem of which content of the domain knowledge should be
selected, how to sequence the different concepts and methods in a plausible order and how to describe
the objectives in a way that meets the students’ developmental age.

Curriculum designers need a framework in which they can categorize both existing and newly developed
information and problem-solving methods and their qualities such as the level of complexity.

Categorization of Information and Methods

Three broad categories of information and methods are distinguished (a) philosophy, religion and
anthropology (b)empirical sciences and their applications (c)formal sciences ,such as logic, mathematics
and information sciences.

Curriculum design

For solving the curriculum design problem, a general heuristics suggested that comprises the need
analysis, the description of the goal and the knowledge and the skills to be acquired.

The relation between curriculum and instructional design

The way in which the curriculum is designed , especially how the content is structured, influences the
instructional design. The structure of the content is leading the design regardless of the story that leads
the communication between the expert and the student. The structure can be embedded in the
instructional design for example designs that emphasize the context such as in ‘situated cognition’. The
acquisition of these is part of the goal of the curriculum. The planning of the curriculum, instruction,
implementation and assessment is depicted in a model. The answer to this question leads to the global
structure of the curriculum. For the design of the curriculum of secondary education, the three
rationales mentioned before are taken into account.
Problem based instructional design

Assumptions on the development of knowledge and skills

The taxonomy of human goals or motives developed by ford (1992) encompasses the subcategory of
cognitive goals, which includes among others (a) exploration (b) understanding and (c) intellectual
creativity. Exploration means satisfying curiosity about personally meaningful events. Understanding
means the development of knowledge that can be used, and intellectual creativity means original
thinking and coming up with novel ideas.

The process of knowledge development and practicing skills

It is assumed that human beings act and reflect on the reality they perceive and that they learn to
distinguish or infer objects. The actions on and reflections about the perceived or imagined objects are
needed for the development of the knowledge.

Reality, representation and media

The use of representations

Because in the empirical and formal sciences the content of instruction is about objects in a reality, the
teacher has to solve the problem of whether to use real objects, a representation of those objects or
both.

Medium and multimedia

The label medium means isolated way but they become integrated in education. For the design of
instruction, the technical conception and the code-related conception are important.

The technical meaning means the technical devices (book, projector, video, computer) that is used for
the production of signs.

The analysis of the information and methods of a domain reveals the concepts, laws, models,
explanations (hypotheses and theories) and design rules that should be acquired as knowledge. The
analysis also reveals the problem-solving methods that were used. In curriculum the information and
methods are organized in chunks of information of modules that are primarily based on features of the
domain.

All environments can function as learning environments. When a learning environment is designed, it
has to be evaluated with regard to whether it has the features that are valuable for the development of
desired knowledge and skills