DEVELOPING CURRICULA BY BLACK BOX METHOD

A curriculum can by time develop to a collection of good courses created, executed, and further developed by individual teachers alone. This can lead to curricula where the connection between the courses cannot clearly be seen and the required inputs and outputs between the courses remain unclear. Courses with same content can be arranged twice or lead to a curriculum where crucial content is missing. In this paper we present two cases of curricula development utilizing the black box method. The first case is a curriculum of a recently started education. The curriculum is examined the first time after its creation by the faculty staff. Second case is a curriculum of an education that has been ongoing for several years. In the black box development method, the faculty staff discuss the courses in terms of input and output knowledge and skills only. Every course is considered as a black box. For each course, the faculty members involved in course implementation identify the specific knowledge the students should enter the course with and what knowledge and skills they should bring with them to future courses. The knowledge and skills are expressed as learning outcomes. By collecting this information from all courses in the curriculum, it is possible to identify the connections between different courses and address any inconsistencies such as unnecessary gaps etc. The black box exercise has been performed for two curricula. In the first stage the teachers identified the required input and expected output of the modules. The results from this stage show the need for increased collaboration between teacher teams as well as within the teams. The process has enhanced dialogue and productive discussions among faculty members and increased awareness of the whole curriculum.