Who is responsible for your school’s curriculum? Is your curriculum delivered to your school from an external resource? Οr do you create it on your own from scratch? In both cases, curriculum management becomes much more efficient when you have a relevant software solution at your service.
Especially, when this software solution comes with a long list of features that support your school administrative tasks, as a whole. For example, being able to coordinate curriculum creation and management processes online (and, therefore, from a distance) is only one of the advantages you get. Want to find out more? Read on, then.
Before we dive deeper into our topic, let’s make some things clear first; starting by explaining what exactly we mean by “curriculum”.
What is curriculum and why it’s critical in achieving your school’s objectives
In the context of our discussion, we use the word curriculum to describe the list of courses that are being delivered within a school, academy or educational institution. And it’s these courses, subjects or training sessions — whatever you call them, based on your school type — that constitute the basis upon which you’ll build — and further develop — all teaching standards and objectives. All in all, the curriculum involves the selection of courses and the process of structuring them in educational levels; and it’s what makes a difference in your school’s overall offering, at the end of the day.
But how can you make this process of selecting courses and then structuring your curriculum more efficient? Before we focus on that already-hinted answer to the question (that is tapping into relevant software solutions) let’s go through the basic pains and hurdles, pertinent to curriculum management.
Curriculum management: actions and challenges to deal with
Regardless if you have already employed a curriculum management software in your school administration or not, you’ll inevitably have to deal with a list of issues or tasks, as described below.
The difference between having such a tool at your disposal and not having one, lies in the level of efficiency you’ll be able to achieve in completing such tasks. And, consequently, on whether you’ll be able to save yourself some trouble — and time — or not.
As mentioned earlier, whatever the case may be for your school, you need to deal with the issues described below; to at least some extent. That is true regardless if you get a preset curriculum structure or you design it on your own.
Fundamental curriculum-related tasks and actions
1. What courses or training subjects do you need to include?
Reflecting on your own or brainstorming with colleagues on what courses or training subjects you need to include or add to your curriculum. That process should be completed — or repeated — for all of your school’s educational levels; that is, your school’s classes or groups.
And, as expected, that process should support continuity of learning throughout all these learning levels and/or groups. Note here that if you’re starting this process entirely from scratch, you’ll need to reflect and decide upon these levels, as well. That is to say, you’ll need to decide on how you are going to group students and subjects before designing your curriculum structure.
2. What should the curriculum structure look like?
Designing and planning the structure of your curriculum is next. Following up the “what”, “what-for” and “for-whom” considerations we described previously, you now need to design and finalize the structure of your curriculum. And structure, as expected, translates into a hierarchy of levels. Which subdivisions are essential for your school or academy? That means, which is the optimal gradation for a studying material (e.g. Math 1, Math 2); or a teaching objective (e.g. Music Theory 1, Music Theory 2)?
3. How is the curriculum structure related to school entities?
That is to say, what is the essence of curriculum management that marks the transition from theory to implementation? The structure above needs to take into consideration your school’s actual needs. More specifically, it’s the part of the process where you need to do the mapping of the curriculum structure to your school’s entities; including classrooms, students, teachers. That is, to see if that’s feasible and functional, in order to make the relevant adaptations.
All in all, the tasks described above help you lay the foundation for your school’s curriculum management. But, how easy is this process? And how can relevant software be of help in upgrading the whole process? Well, that’s exactly what we’re discussing in the next section.
Challenges related to curriculum management
One would probably say that it’s only a matter of listing all training subjects or courses to meet your schools needs. But, is it that simple? Well, with curriculum management software, it seems to be so; as it helps resolve the following challenges:
1. The need to make this demanding decision-making process simpler
Curriculum management is challenging, by its very nature. The tasks and processes you’ll have to deal with, in order to have your curriculum up and running, require making smart decisions; and resolving a broad list of complicated issues. Being able to fiddle with your curriculum components — to easily make small adjustments here and there — in order to better support your decision-making process, does make a difference in the end. Don’t you agree?
And, chances are that doing it with the help of intuitive software can be more efficient; rather than it would be if you tried to sketch the structure on paper. You’d probably need too many pieces of paper till you’d shaped up your curriculum the way it serves your school’s needs best.
To put it another way, without curriculum management software, you’d be burdening yourself with trivial and secondary actions; that is, rather than dealing with the essence of the process, itself.
2. Taking available resources into account and putting curriculum into action
Does your curriculum structure meet your school’s actual needs? Obviously, no curriculum is just a static theoretical scheme. There are many parameters involved; such that will probably force you to make adaptations. In other words, putting your curriculum into practice may present the need for you to reorganize or restructure your initial plan. All things considered, once you have created your curriculum scheme, you’ll need to — somehow — “connect” it to your school’s real needs; and, thus, you must answer any questions arising and resolve issues, such as the following:
- Does the number of students that actually enrolled fall into the ballpark you had in mind?
- How can you group them into classes?
- Do you have enrollment requests for all educational levels you’ve designed or planned (classes, groups)?
- What about the availability of teachers?
- How are you going to manage your classrooms (with the assigned lessons as you have planned them)?
Curriculum management done right
Designing the structure of a curriculum from scratch is, indeed, a challenging task. The same is true if you’re only responsible for putting a prefixed curriculum structure into practice. With curriculum management software at your service, you can leave all these difficulties behind; and focus on what is beneficial towards your school’s objectives. If you’re looking for value-for-money in curriculum management, try DreamClass, for free; and enjoy flexibility and efficiency in how you deal with all of your administrative tasks.