Resilient curriculum: empowering the teaching team

Nationally, there is increasing demand for assurance of quality teaching and learning in Higher Education: teaching practice needs to be agile, and underpinned by robust assurance of learning. Federal government performance-based funding arrangements highlights the student experience, inclusive of teaching quality, and the TEQSA Guidance Note: Scholarship (2018) expects individual and institutional evidence that academics undertake scholarly informed teaching. However, resource allocation to teaching is under pressure and approaches to develop and assure new curriculum can be inconsistent, the roles of education-focused academics can be ill-defined and, typically, scholarly approaches to teaching and learning are siloed at unit level, ad-hoc and key-person dependent. Recognising the ubiquity and complexity of this situation, the Australian Council of Deans of Science (ACDS) inaugural Fellowship was awarded to promote the Curriculum Evaluation Research (CER) framework and resources (Kelder et al., 2020) in STEM disciplines. The CER is a way for learning and teaching leaders to conceptualise and organise how to implement a teaching team-based approach to scholarship that ensures evidence-based decisions for resilient curriculum. We present our method for connecting with academics nationally, and within COSE, and reflect on the worldwide disruptive impacts of COVID-19, particularly rapid changes to curriculum, without time to think about evidence for or of ‘quality’. We pose critical questions on what a resilient system for curriculum design, delivery and evaluation can look like. Beyond Covid-19, we propose that the CER framework will be instrumental in teaching teams working together to monitor and evaluate the impact of our new courses offered from 2021.