Benchmarking and Talking Curriculum in the Great White North

As the next step of our successful “Benchmarking Curriculum Management in Eastern Canada” initiative, currently with 20 participating institutions and several more requesting to be added to the project, we travelled to Ottawa, Ontario to meet with participants and finalise the content of our joint White Paper as one of the principal outputs. The weather was decidedly cold, but the welcome from our Canadian colleagues couldn’t have been warmer.

 

The roundtable meeting resulted in a clarity of purpose for the project and a shared vision relating to the resulting findings. One agreed outcome at the Roundtable was that there needs to be a clearer shared understanding in the sector of the breadth and depth of the functionality of current digitised curriculum management systems.

Partnering with the Higher Education Strategy Associates national conference, Re: University, we had the opportunity to engage with a broader cohort of university colleagues and discuss the critical circumstances facing Canadian universities today. With over 450 representatives from almost 100 Canadian higher education institutions, it was a great opportunity to put our fingers on the pulse of what issues are emerging for the Canadian university and college sectors. Not surprisingly, these were very reflective of our own experiences here in Australia, emphasising the need for universities to “do more with less” by increasing the efficiency of their curricular systems while also facing greater compliance and reporting requirements from the various governing bodies.

Conference attendees from universities across the country were keen to learn more about the benefits of digitising their curriculum in general, and about Curriculum First, our (newly named) CMS just being introduced to the Canadian market for the first time. We look forward to some lively discussions around the broader aspects of the constantly changing landscape of curriculum management not only in Canada and Australia, but globally.