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Strategies for Curriculum Development

The most successful distance learning institutions, such as the Open University, have put great stress on careful development of curriculum material. This appears to be the price factor in their success. There is, however, little empirical information that compares different strategies for development. Within institutions such as Open University full scale development strategies have been pursued. These are costly, but the distance learning universities deliver education at lower cost per student than formal universities. The additional expenditure put into the course development process more than repays itself, for courses with many students.

This is difficult for many teachers, administrators, and professors to understand, because often there is little attention paid to curriculum development, particularly in United States Universities. The standard procedure in the formal university is that the faculty member chooses a textbook. Usually the available textbooks are not very different from each other, each typically following the pattern of the ''best selling'' textbook of the immediate past in that area. So there is little choice. Many of the pedagogical decisions about the course are made when the text book is picked. So in the traditional formal university little experience is gathered with course development. To develop a course usually means to pick the text book and to make an outline, usually closely following the text book and the lectures for that course.

Where there are more formal methods of curriculum development, we find that these methods are often influenced by theories of learning. The theories of learning available today are not impressive. There is little empirical backing for one learning approach over another learning approach. Thus in training environments behavioral strategies are widely used in curriculum development, but in schools and universities these approaches, in spite of their heavy promotion, have not been successful. They often neglect the motivational issues that are critical for student learning. Cognitive approaches have potential for the future, but this potential is seldom realized today.