On the Description of Individual Course Units for Programme Assessment and Better Syllabuses

Presently, higher education programmes are being assessed at several different levels, locally, or even countrywide. In this paper, we propose a template for the description of each curricular unit in higher education programmes that seeks to promote reflective teaching, widely acknowledged as fundamental to improve practices leading to improved student learning, while being advantageous and convenient for programme assessment by external entities. To this end, we take as a starting point the template that all Portuguese higher education institutions have to fill for each curricular unit, for programme assessment purposes. Based on the literature, we argue this new template format fosters teacher reflection and provides additional and easier to compare data for accreditation boards, and the whole education community, most notably, students. Finally, we argue that it can and should be used to improve syllabuses

A Proposal for the Description of Individual Course Units

The description of individual course units is here presented as a privileged way to improve course quality by fostering teacher reflection. To that end, the paper presents a structured way to specify the several parts that compose the course unit descriptions.  The most important parts are made strongly interconnected as a way to maximize coherence and force additional reflection during course design. The paper presents a concrete template that expands the recommendations and course unit data present in the ECTS User’s Guide. Besides including the usual course data, the template guides the course designer towards the specification of several alignments between the data. These alignments make the course unit descriptions self justifying and internally coherent. Additionally,, a grading strategy is briefly presented and the intended learning outcomes are classified according to the European Qualification Framework for Lifelong Learning