A two-day Symposium on “Curriculum Development in Higher Education” will begin at Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU), Islamabad on Tuesday. The Symposium, which is being organized by the Academics Division of Higher Education Commission (HEC), is aimed at brainstorming the most suitable procedure to be adopted as a guideline for undertaking curriculum revision and development at undergraduate and graduate levels.
The experts, invited from relevant fields in academia as well as industry, will review the current practices of curriculum development in higher education and will have focus group discussions to recommend strategies for improving the current practices.
The symposium is aimed at placing higher education in its local milieu from the international context that is kept in view when transplanting educational practices, identifying and filling the gaps that currently exist in higher education curriculum planning, responding to needs of the society and related industries, fulfilling the curriculum development needs with regards to coordination and alignment, improving horizontal and vertical relationship in curriculum, and revising the curriculum on regular bases for continuous improvement.
It is expected that by end of this activity a white paper highlighting specific recommendations on the theme and the objective of this symposium will be developed by the core committee consisting of curriculum planning specialists. This white paper will serve as guidelines for Curriculum Division of HEC to set framework and standards of curriculum development in an appropriate way.