Teaching Methods and Curriculum Design in Higher Education

The ideology of curriculum design is believed to be the core of teaching and learning, yet it is in direct opposition to current notions of curriculum development. The contextual factors that underpin teaching and learning are derived from curriculum design. The principal factors that influence what is being taught may be categorised into three levels: the macro, meso and micro. At the macro level, there are national and international influences such as globalisation, massification, and marketization. Also, socio-economic, and political influence may be included. At the meso-level the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and institutional level influence is forthcoming. Issues such as policies, culture, location, student profile and so forth are examined. Also, external influence from employers, professional bodies, accreditation bodies, quality agencies as well as political redress is evaluated. The micro-level examines individual academics and support staff concerning personal theories, beliefs, and professional knowledge. Systems theory in the educational context views the institution as a system where there is an interaction of variables of input, process and output that enable learning to take place. Because of the complexity and nature of curriculum design, there is limited change in this critical sphere of the education system. This paper reflects on the design and development of a curriculum in an open distance learning higher education institution.

The scientific research program of a knowledge‐centered systems‐oriented approach to socio‐scientific conceptualization is invoked here to develop a broader concept of human sustainability. Knowledge‐induced fields are shown to arise from the process‐oriented methodology of an interactive, integrative and evolutionary (IIE) worldview of continuous learning. Such a process is found to give rise to a unique theory of generalized systems with a universal paradigm and application that are premised on the epistemology of unity of knowledge. We discuss the validity of this model for human development as objectified by the concept of a well‐being criterion function with extensive complementarity among the variables and relations embedded in this criterion. The underlying epistemology of unity of knowledge and a unified worldview is thus shown to yield a substantively new concept of human sustainability, particularly relating to issues and curriculum design in higher education and their socio‐scientific implications.

Curriculum Design in Higher Education:

This paper presents a meta-analysis grounded on a previously conducted systematic literature review on game-based learning (GBL) in Entrepreneurship Education (EE), with a particular focus on comparing the design principles, pedagogical value, and learning outcomes of experiential versus non-experiential game-like methodologies. While existing literature provides rich taxonomies of GBL tools and learning intentions, there is a gap in understanding how differing instructional approaches shape entrepreneurial competence development—particularly in terms of depth, engagement, and transferability of knowledge and skills. Experiential GBL approaches — such as role-playing scenarios, makerspace projects, entrepreneurial challenges, and serious games — immerse learners in problem-centered, often collaborative environments that mirror real-life entrepreneurial dynamics. These formats emphasize learning through doing, reflection, and iteration, and are deeply rooted in constructivist and transformative learning theories. In contrast, non-experiential approaches — such as gamified quizzes, flashcards, point systems, and digital badges — aim to increase engagement and motivation through extrinsic rewards, but often limit the learner’s active agency and emotional investment in the process. Our analysis indicates that experiential methodologies consistently show stronger results in fostering higher-order entrepreneurial competencies, such as creativity, opportunity recognition, resilience, and decision-making under uncertainty. These formats promote not only cognitive learning but also personal growth, self-efficacy, and teamwork. However, their implementation requires greater time, instructor preparation, and contextual adaptability. Non-experiential formats offer scalability, consistency, and ease of assessment, making them suitable for foundational knowledge acquisition or large-scale learning environments, yet may lack the depth needed for transformational outcomes. The paper concludes with implications for course and curriculum design in higher education, drawing on an applied example from a university-level entrepreneurship course that embodies experiential GBL principles. This serves as a case study for translating meta-analytic insights into actionable educational practice and provides a roadmap for educators and institutions seeking to enhance EE through game-based strategies tailored to their specific goals and constraints

<ns2:p>Competency-based curriculum design in higher education has currently gained relevance in vocational training as a productive technique due to the urgent need to prepare citizens capable of facing the challenges of a globalized world. In this context, training modules become a transcendental didactic strategy for organizing learning around observable, relevant, and contextualized outcomes. However, in multicultural societies such as ours, it is essential to incorporate an intercultural approach in curriculum design and training modules to ensure their social relevance, equity, and recognition of the cultural diversity of the country and the region. This article reviews the literature on the design of training modules from a competency-based curriculum approach, emphasizing the contributions and challenges of the intercultural approach.</ns2:p>

The study aimed to design and analyze the three-layer structure of themes (comprehensive, organizing, and basic) in the ecotourism curriculum with a focus on promoting environmental literacy in higher education. This exploratory mixed-method study was conducted in two phases: qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 experts and faculty members in ecotourism, tourism, and curriculum studies. The data were analyzed using network-based thematic analysis. In the quantitative phase, data were collected from 384 experts, graduates, and postgraduate students using a structured questionnaire. The data were analyzed through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling using SPSS and SmartPLS. Qualitative findings identified five comprehensive themes: learning perspectives, the body of ecotourism knowledge, teaching–learning strategies, learning assessment and monitoring, and environmental competencies and skills. Confirmatory factor analysis validated 20 organizing themes and 76 basic themes. Model fit indices (NFI=0.968, GOF=0.557, SRMR=0.002) confirmed the structural soundness of the three-layer framework. Significant positive correlations were found among all themes and the environmental literacy–based ecotourism curriculum. The three-layer thematic framework provides a coherent model for ecotourism curriculum design in higher education. By integrating environmental literacy principles, it fosters deeper learning, responsible environmental attitudes, and enhanced ecological competencies among students. The model can be effectively applied in other interdisciplinary fields such as environmental management and sustainable tourism education.

Purpose This study aims to explore the integration of mandala thinking and multisensory techniques into advanced dessert design courses, investigating how these innovative pedagogical approaches enhance students’ creative and aesthetic skills. The research seeks to address the evolving needs of higher education in the face of technological and pedagogical disruptions. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a mixed-method approach, including a detailed literature review, implementation of mandala thinking and multisensory methods in the course curriculum and quantitative analysis of student outcomes. Data were collected through pre- and post-course assessments, focusing on students’ creativity and aesthetic competencies. Findings The integration of mandala thinking and multisensory design principles significantly improved students’ creative and aesthetic skills. The findings demonstrate that these methods effectively enhance the educational experience in culinary arts, offering a novel approach to curriculum design in higher education. The study highlights how these innovative techniques can address current pedagogical challenges and improve student engagement and performance. Practical implications Integrating mandala thinking and multisensory techniques can significantly enhance creativity and engagement in higher education, offering a practical model for modernizing pedagogical practices and addressing current educational challenges. Originality/value This research contributes to the field by applying mandala thinking and multisensory techniques to advanced dessert design, an area not extensively covered in existing literature. It provides a unique perspective on enhancing educational practices in the culinary arts, reflecting the broader trends of incorporating innovative pedagogical strategies in response to disruptive educational challenges.

Given the persistent challenges in promoting pro-environmental behavior and student engagement in higher education, particularly in environmental courses, this study examines the effects of creative teaching strategies—specifically icebreaker games and activities—on cognitive understanding, attitudes, and pro-environmental behaviors among first-year university students in environmental education. Grounded in the Green Competency framework and game-based learning theory, the study addresses an empirical gap concerning the sustained impacts of active learning approaches. A Solomon four-group experimental design was employed with 200 students enrolled in the Environmental Society course at Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi (RMUTT). Pre- and post-tests assessed changes across the three learning domains. ANOVA and Scheffé post hoc analyses revealed statistically significant improvements in cognition, attitudes, and behaviors among students exposed to the intervention, particularly those receiving both pre-testing and innovative instruction. Regression analysis indicated that cognitive understanding was the strongest predictor of pro-environmental behavior (β = 0.531, p &lt; 0.001), while demographic variables showed no significant influence. The findings demonstrate that well-designed icebreaker activities can enhance student engagement and foster lasting behavioral change when aligned with course objectives. This study contributes to the sustainability education literature by linking active pedagogy, emotional engagement, and behavioral outcomes and offers practical implications for student-centered curriculum design in higher education.

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to advance a framework for understanding and teaching game design in higher education, in order to address complexities inherent in teaching game design courses. Everyday teaching and learning game design often deviate from the standard textbook model of game design. In reality everyday teaching and learning operate with handling game design curriculum, how to think games, and how to organise the development process. The presented framework merge curriculum, thinking, and process guided by the game design concept of juiciness. The framework will be presented by dismantling the standard textbook model of game design into three; game design (curriculum), game design thinking (thinking), and game development (organisation). In this perspective game design is concerned with game mechanics, game design thinking preoccupied with paper prototyping, metaphor, and framing, while game developments addresses player experience including play and game testing. This article will coin vertical design as juiciness as opposed to horizontal design understood as expanding system layout. Juiciness will be placed as a guiding principle in the relationship between designers and designed content as an aspect of designer intentions and motivations. Lastly, the content centric framework will be presented by merging game design, game design thinking, game development, vertical design with selected aspects of accepted software development strategies as an approach to teaching and learning game design in higher education.

The concept of curriculum alignment is held as a guiding principle of good curriculum design in higher education. Curriculum alignment can be mapped using a variety of strategies and tools. This paper reports on a project that expands the horizons of curriculum review by applying a novel methodology, word clouds, to investigate the use of student reflections for exploring curriculum alignment.Students, from Australia and Denmark, engaged in written reflections about their learning in a Business Brand Marketing subject. These reflections provide the data that is analysed for its alignment with the subject’s learning outcomes. The word cloud analysis is found to be useful in providing evidence of curriculum alignment and indicators for directing deeper textual analysis.

In this paper, we sought to address the following research question: What knowledge and skills are needed by instructional designers in higher education to be successful in their roles? We interviewed eight instructional designers from across the United States, all working for institutions of higher education. Using the constant comparative method, we analyzed our data to identify relevant themes. Our results suggest that instructional designers in higher education must have a solid foundation in instructional design and learning theory, possess soft skills and technical skills, and have a willingness to learn on the job. Most instructional designers felt their academic backgrounds assisted them with their job roles, and, in particular, valued their professional experiences. Instructional designers in higher education must also keep abreast of multiple emerging information and communication technologies. We provide a discussion to synthesize our findings. The findings are relevant to professionals, professional academic programs, and professional associations.

The ideas of project-based language learning (PBLL) align well with the action-oriented approach, which is currently seen as the most promising approach in language education (Piccardo &amp; North, 2019). In this study, we carried out the scoping review of empirical research articles describing the implementation of PBLL in higher education during the last 10 years (2011-2021), to answer these research questions: How are project-based language learning experiences designed and implemented in higher education? What are the characteristics of effective language learning projects that could be offered to university students? The results reveal that PBLL can be implemented in creative and varied ways in language education. The reviewed cases provide various solutions for topics, questions, or problems of projects; ways of designing the authentic learning environment; measures for ensuring student choice and voice; ideas for students’ reflection, critique, revision, and assessment; as well as a range of public products that students could create as outcomes of projects, which may be beneficial for language educators and curriculum designers in higher education.

This chapter presents a new paradigm for sustainable data-driven language learning systems design in higher education that draws on qualitative reflections spanning a decade (2012–2022) with stakeholders from an ongoing global research study with the FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) and F-Lingo projects at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand (Fitzgerald (2019) A new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education; König et al. (2022) Smart CALL). Design considerations are presented for remixing domain-specific open access content into Open Educational Resources (OER) for academic English language provision across formal and non-formal higher education contexts. Primary stakeholders in the research collaboration include the following three groups: (1) Knowledge organisations that provide open access to academic content—libraries and archives, including the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive, universities in collaboration with MOOC providers and the CORE (COnnecting REpositories) open access aggregation service at the UK Open University; (2) Researchers who mine and remix academic content into corpora and open data-driven language learning systems—converging from the fields of open education, computer science and applied corpus linguistics; (3) Knowledge users who re-use and remix academic content into OER—English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners from university language centres. Automated content analysis was carried out on a corpus of interview and focus discussion data with the three stakeholder groups in this research. We discuss themes arising from the research data that reflect the different stakeholders’ experiences of remixing open access research content that has been produced within the academy for re-use as open educational content for teaching and learning features of academic language within open data-driven language learning systems. These open learning systems have been specifically designed to scale with OER expansion and traction in mind for their sustainable uptake both within and beyond the brick and mortar of the traditional university. The new paradigm presented in this chapter challenges, as the OER movement must, established business models and deeply embedded cultural or institutional norms that present obstacles to OER expansion and traction and the sustainability of the movement. One persistent challenge concerns the lack of open education policy across the higher education sector for full open access (for use, modification, adaptation) via Creative Commons licensing to content produced within the academy. Thus, while this research has theoretical and practical implications in applied linguistics, computer science, language teaching and learning and open education, more generally, it also has significant cultural, business model and policy implications for higher education.KeywordsData-driven learningDesign-based researchEnglish for academic purposes (EAP)Higher educationMassive open online courses (MOOCs)Open accessOpen educational practicesOpen educational resources (OER)Systems design

Higher education continuously perpetuates systems of domination through the (re)production of Western knowledge systems that inherently marginalize and “other” Indigenous people and knowledges. Through a postcolonial approach to competency-based curriculum (re)design, we propose a framework that centers the knowledges and voices of marginalized people as a way to dismantle oppressive systems in higher education. In this chapter, we define colonialism; discuss higher education’s role in perpetuating colonialism; define and discuss competency-based curriculum design; define and discuss higher education’s role in postcolonialism and curriculum design; and discuss our framework for competency-based curriculum (re)design. Stage One is characterized by “denaturalization” which is guided by a “thick inclusion” of traditionally marginalized knowledges (Stein in Comparative Education Review 61:S25–S50, 2017). Stage Two creates spaces of (un)learning and (un)knowing and is contextually based on traditionally marginalized knowledges. Through this framework, we seek to decolonize higher education and support traditionally marginalized individuals.

In the first instance, it is worthwhile examining the context for curriculum changes in 2005. The Higher Education Statistics Agency in 2004 recorded the number of dyslexic undergraduates in the U.K. as 11,865,clearly illustrating the growth rate from the total dyslexic undergraduate population in 1994 of 1,679 students (HESA, 2004). Art led Higher Education institutions should also be aware that the Creative Arts and Design subject areas attracted the highest percentage of dyslexic students at 5.59% Even if the new Disabilities Discrimination Act 2005 did not require a mandatory focus on changes to the curriculum, the reality of a changing audience would force the issue onto the agenda. In seeking accommodation for dyslexic students it would seem beneficial to examine the whole curriculum as perhaps in redressing the balance, the Art curriculum designers will find a mode of delivery and assessment which benefits an increasingly diverse student population.