Theory Of Curriculum

"Curriculum theory" is a term for how an educational institution decides what is at

worth to learn and teach, and how learning will be measured. Pedagogy is closely
related to curriculum theory, but where pedagogy describes how people teach and
learn, curriculum describes how people decide what to teach and learn. Moodle is
capable of supporting a variety of different curriculum theories and pedagogies.
CONTENTS
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 1 Overview
 2 Academic
 3 Pragmatic
 4 Individualist
 5 Idealist
Overview
The mission of Moodle is "Empowering educators to improve our world." Moodle
strives to help educators to provide quality education around the world. But first, we
have to answer an important question: “What is quality education?” We can’t
measure what we haven’t defined. But this is a very difficult question to answer-- in
fact, there is not just one single answer. The answer can differ depending on time
and place, and most people work with more than one of these definitions. Here are
some things “quality education” might mean. They are all valid. Some are much
harder to measure than others, but that doesn’t mean the hard things are less
important. In fact, they may be MOST important.
 The best students will be identified and will become scholars
 All students will demonstrate essential competencies
 All students will develop lifelong learning habits and skills and pursue their
own goals
 All students will be included and will commit to community ideals and action
There are many ways to categorize curriculum theories, but this structure serves as
a useful reference:

Source of knowledge

Objective Academic Individualist Subjective

reality Students become Students develop lifelong reality
scholars learning habits
 Traditional teaching Learner centered
Cognitivism Constructivism

Pragmatic Idealist
Students achieve Students commit to ideals
competencies and take action
Workplace training Transformational learning
Behaviorism Social constructivism

Use of knowledge

For more information, see Curriculum Theory: Conflicting visions and enduring

concerns by Michael Schiro.
In this structure, an educational program (or teacher) can be aligned with any of
these four curriculum theories, and most are aligned with more than one at any given
time. The alignment can change over time, and by context. These are just terms
used to reference the educational priorities currently in effect.
The important thing to note is that each curriculum theory aligns with a specific
pedagogy, and this has implications for choosing teaching strategies, assessments,
program evaluation criteria, learning analytics models, etc. Moodle provides a wide
variety of tools to support these different curriculum theories.
Academic
An institution focused on an Academic curriculum has the following goals:
 Student capabilities will be accurately measured
 Student grades follow normal curve
 Students graduate on time
 Top students pursue academic careers
Every community needs to be able to identify and encourage its own scholars.
Moodle supports the growth of local scholars in many ways, especially by providing a
flexible Assignment module that can accept a wide variety of files,
incorporating Advanced grading methods like Rubrics and Marking Guides to
support consistency in grading. Files can be annotated online by the teacher, and
comments can be exchanged between teacher and student.
Moodle also supports external academic honesty and reference checking tools
like Crot and TurnItIn, often requested by academic institutions to help teach good
scholarship practices. Moodle provides tools requiring students to agree to academic
codes of conduct when first logging in or when submitting particular assessments.
Moodle provides a detailed Quiz statistics report that provides psychometric analysis
of individual quiz questions. This helps to ensure that quizzes are assessing
students accurately and fairly.
Learning analytics for this perspective might focus on features of the program, rather
than the individual students, although advising students of where they rank in the
program may also be appropriate. Note that there can be consequences to this
notification-- students who are not ranked highest may become discouraged.
Pragmatic
We don’t want to focus only on the highest-potential students. We also want to make
sure that all students (or as many as possible) achieve essential competencies. In
this case, we have different tools, targets and process indicators. In this curriculum
theory, the institution prioritizes these goals:
 All students complete course
 All students master designated competencies
 All students obtain jobs
Moodle includes a wide range of “Personalized Learning” tools to allow courses and
materials to be tailored to individual needs, taking into account each learner’s prior
knowledge and skills:
 Access restrictions
 Lesson module with branching
 Quizzes with feedback
 SCORM support
 Course completion criteria
 Competencies and Learning plans
The Students at risk of dropping out learning analytics model uses the target of
continuing participation in learning. This target was chosen because it makes few
assumptions. Final grades or summative assessment results are often not stored in
Moodle, and many institutions do not yet use Moodle Competencies or Course
Completion Criteria. Only success criteria that are stored in Moodle can be used to
train a model.
Individualist
We also know that we don’t want to focus only on “schooling.” We hope to
encourage students to continue to learn throughout their lives, in both formal and
informal environments. This involves helping students develop “metacognitive” skills,
such as finding and evaluating information, self-regulation, and the ability to self-
assess skills and knowledge. Learners have their own personal goals as well, which
we need to respect. These targets and indicators are especially important when
trying to use learning analytics in MOOCs, which students enroll in for many different
reasons, with different success criteria:
 Learner Centered
  Each learner’s own goals are reached
 Each learner is satisfied
 Each learner improves in capabilities over time
“Checklist” is a third-party Moodle plugin that allows learners to specify their own
goals and target dates, as well as allowing them to self-evaluate on those goals. This
is one kind of feature we need to help assess self-directed learning capacity. We can
use the Feedback tool to capture learner satisfaction data and comments, including
site-wide feedback tools set up on the site front page and accessed in each course
via the Feedback block. We might also integrate goal-setting with external calendar
and reminder systems, or help learners “gamify” their own personal goals. (It is also
possible to create a personal goal registry like this using Database, though the
completion bar would require custom CSS.)
We might consider making self-assessment a measured skill, e.g. by using
the Workshop Submission/Self-Assessment feature. This feature measures
assessment skill compared to a mean of peer and/or teacher scores, and assigns a
separate grade for assessment skill as well as a grade for the main task.
Portfolio tools are often used to help learners curate and compare samples of their
work to see progress over time.
Idealist
In the Idealist curriculum theory, we stress the inclusion of all students and social
constructivist learning.
 All students participate fully in the course (are not marginalized)
 All students commit to ideals
 All students carry learning to the real world
We believe learners adopt new ideals through open dialogue and engagement, and
Moodle provides robust Forum tools for supporting discussion.
However, the commitment to such ideals in the real world can’t be measured within
the constraints of a course or training program. To follow up with learners “in the real
world,” we might need a tool like this third-party Moodle module, “Reengagement”.
This tool contacts learners at a specified time after an event, asking them to return to
the course to complete additional activities.