Working from the evidence of prior art and experience in curriculum database development

Abstract

There are many potential benefits from systematic documentation of university degree curricula, including facilitation of curriculum review, accreditation reporting and better information for students, lecturers and administrators. The importance of such documentation and its growing complexity has motivated many attempts to create software systems to manage it more effectively. However, there has been little reported on the process of creating such systems and experience of using them. This paper describes the 10 year evolution of the CUSP curriculum database at the University of Sydney's Faculty of Engineering & TT, from a 200 unit, engineering- specific repository, to a multi-faculty platform for 169 degree pathways and over 2000 units of study. The paper contributes to the understanding of challenges of large scale curriculum modeling and curriculum information management and shares lessons learnt in building systems to support these processes and the people involved.