Program-Level Curriculum Support
Strategic guidance to review, renew, and develop academic programs
Leading program-level curriculum change requires balancing academic vision, governance requirements, and evolving educational landscapes.
Today’s students navigate rapid social, technological, and environmental changes. Curriculum scholars Ronald Barnett and Kelly Coate (2005) emphasize, “A complex and uncertain world requires curricula in which students as human beings are placed at their centre.” By focusing on adaptable, learner-centred program design, you can help your students build the confidence and skills they need to navigate an ever-changing world.
The Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) provides strategic, evidence-backed guidance to support curriculum committees and academic leaders through every stage of program review, renewal, and development. Whether you are launching a new credential, updating an established degree, or aligning your curriculum with university commitments, CTL offers practical frameworks and hands-on facilitation to save your unit time and elevate program quality.
Start by connecting with CTL for a clear, solution-focused process from inception to implementation. If you’ve been working on curriculum, join us to sharpen and motivate your process, ensuring everything’s in place for approval.
An integrated campus partnership
Curriculum development moves faster and more smoothly when governance and pedagogy are aligned. Focusing on learner-centred pedagogical aspects, CTL works in close coordination with key Provost portfolios to provide seamless, coordinated support:
- Programs Office: Demystifying institutional approval pathways and governance submissions.
- Centre for Teaching and Learning: Ensuring evidence-based pedagogical design in curricula that benefits learners' development and preparation for graduation.
- Office of Indigenous Programming and Research: Embedding commitments from Braiding Past, Present and Future.
- Office of Access, Community and Belonging: Designing accessible, flexible program pathways and equitable learning environments.
- Online Learning and Continuing Education: Aligning online and continuing education course delivery with academic program goals.
These partners offer essential support throughout your process, which includes visioning, determining program learning outcomes, data gathering (including student voices and external inputs), curriculum mapping, revised program analysis and alignment, submitting your program for approval, implementation, and evaluation. This is a cyclical process standard to post-secondary pedagogical quality and innovation. Every academic program should review its curriculum every five to seven years.
How CTL supports your academic unit
1. Aligning pedagogical goals with governance
CTL offers pedagogical guidance and connects you with institutional partners to:
- Navigate approval pathways: Map out clear, step-by-step strategies for new program development or major program reviews and renewals alongside institutional experts.
- Embed university strategic priorities: Tangibly integrate Indigenous perspectives, community-centered approaches, and student experience initiatives into program design.
- Adapt curricula with the future in mind: Address emergent campus priorities, including defining program-level Generative AI competencies and selecting strategic course delivery modes.
2. Consultation and collegial guidance
CTL guides envisioning where program-level curriculum can go next, including:
- Strategizing what’s needed: Gathering data to define curriculum goals in collaboration with faculty, instructors, students, alumni, practitioners, and industries.
- Program learning outcomes: Practical workshops to draft, scaffold, and refine precise outcomes that define what your graduates know, can do, and value.
- Curriculum mapping: Workshops to employ visual auditing tools to evaluate course progression, affirm strengths, eliminate hidden learning gaps, and align assessments.
3. Collaborative gatherings and structured workshops
CTL offers two ways to advance curriculum work:
- Structured workshops: Step-by-step working sessions that walk committee members through program learning outcome design, curriculum mapping, and governance planning.
- Curriculum Collaboratory: A monthly working group (held the first Tuesday of each month from 11:30 a.m. to 12:50 p.m.) where program leaders co-create adaptable guidance, test tools, and solve shared curriculum challenges.
Get Started
For deans, department chairs and curriculum committee chairs
Planning a new program, review, renewal, or departmental retreat on curriculum change?
For curriculum committees and academic staff
Looking to build practical skills in program learning outcome design, data gathering, curriculum mapping, or GenAI integration?.
Stay tuned into curriculum support
A monthly e-mail update on upcoming gatherings, resources and innovative work happening around program-level curriculum.
Looking for individual course support?
Explore CTL’s resources and upcoming Course (re)Design Labs.