Co-creating sustainable and dynamic curriculum : a decision support system for assuring graduate capability

An important challenge facing higher education institutions is authentically assuring graduate capabilities. The focus has shifted beyond discipline knowledge to include the assessment of ‘softer skills’. Many institutions have developed policies and procedures through curriculum reform and renewal processes. Too often these processes involve isolated ‘soft’ approaches such as ‘ticking the box’, use of summary statistics and gap analysis which are both imprecise and piecemeal. Despite growing interest in assuring employable graduate capabilities, there has been little research into using a more structured holistic approach engaging with multiple key stakeholders. This research proposes decision support system adopting a multi-criteria decision approach (MCDA) to appraise course level outcomes and the robustness of assessment policy decisions. The objective is to authentically assure graduate capability by considering multiple key criteria to reduce arbitrariness of current approaches to assessment decisions. Multiple scenarios are presented to explain the application of MCDA in evaluating assessment benchmarks using simple to complex criteria.

© The Authors, 2023.