The market for students is more competitive than ever. Financial sustainability for most institutions is dependent on the attractiveness of your teaching portfolio to prospective students. There has also been political pressure to diversify portfolios, in terms of content and products, such as apprenticeships, accelerated degrees and micro-credentials.
So finding the right balance of curriculum breadth and specialist depth linked to your strategic areas of strength is important.
But it’s not just about what you teach, it’s about how you teach and assess students. Many of our members are considering questions such as:
To help build that understanding, we can conduct market research for you. We evaluate your current curriculum in terms of its attractiveness, sustainability and complexity. We work in partnership with you to understand your approaches to curriculum delivery and how they impact on student success.
With a complex mix of financial, political and operational drivers for change, each institution must explore their own situation. We work with you to carry out a needs analysis for the curriculum delivery that will keep you relevant in a changing world.
Once your drivers for change are clear, we’ll support you with the evidence to make decisions about how to deliver a relevant and high-performing curriculum which prepares your students to thrive in complex environments.
We worked with the University to review its current framework, facilitating a high level of academic and professional services engagement and providing an options analysis. As a result, the University is phasing out ten-credit modules, leading to a less complex curriculum which is easier to deliver.
SUMS conducted an analysis of the taught curriculum, providing the College with a dashboard of metrics, highlighting the complexity of the curriculum. A parallel report provided insight into the causes and symptoms of complexity on timetabling and the student experience.
We are working with Bournemouth on a project to understand multiple intersecting elements relating to curriculum delivery: portfolio size and shape, academic calendar, delivery mode, module credit framework and priorities in timetable design. We are looking at how these elements impact on student success and operational efficiency.
Whether you need an in-depth analysis and recommendations for significant transformation, or a more high-level review from a critical friend, we have the expertise to support you at every stage. In designing our support, we bring together higher education-specific insight from our comparative research and benchmarking, and world-leading effective practice from other sectors and internationally.
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