Moving towards the STEAM age
How AI can Transform Student-Centred Curriculum Design
Sir Ken Robinson 1950-2020
The Creative Curriculum
Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk in 2006 ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity’[i] is the most watched on the platform, with over 75 million views.
The talk clearly resonates with many. However, the increased focus and funding for STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and the often disparaging view of the Arts as ‘soft’ subjects expressed by politicians and others suggests that we are further from Robinson’s vision of a creative curriculum than when his talk was first presented.
If the Robinson TED talk resonates so strongly, why is it so difficult to implement a truly creative curriculum?
Robinson frequently returned to the subject of creativity in education, and in 2015 he looked at the challenges of delivering a creative curriculum in Universities in a talk at the RSA[ii] .
Robinson suggested that rather than simply adopting ‘tacked on’ ideas about ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’, ‘design’ or ‘interdisciplinarity, delivering a genuinely creative curriculum in Universities requires a complete cultural change in the structures of organisations that deliver higher education.
For Robinson within the ‘inherently conservative’ University system:
“the pressure for accountability tends to drive people back into their disciplines”
STEAM not STEM
This challenge has been recognised by those who argue that the focus on the STEM subjects should be broadened out to create a STEAM curriculum where the creative thinking of the arts is incorporated. A great example of this notion of a STEAM approach is seen in Leonardo DaVinci’s exhortation to his students to:
Study the science of art. Study the art of science.[iii]
And the statement attributed to Picasso:
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once ‘he’ grows up.
The challenge we face from the growth in the use of AI highlights the value of the human capacity for creativity and imagination to ensure a continued role and relevance for humanity.
Challenging the Sector
While all Universities aspire to deliver the most dynamic and diverse curriculum possible to foster increased levels of creativity and innovation for students, the existing structures of most institutions still revolve around faculties, departments and subject programme teams.
The embedded cultural and funding models of Universities are built around course discipline-based curriculums, managed and resourced within departmental units. This infrastructure can work against any aspirations to create a new approach to curriculum design.
For the vast majority of University programmes, the problem that Ken Robinson identified still exists – curriculum delivery focuses on discipline knowledge to the detriment of nurturing the creative skills of the student.
To create an inclusive curriculum which embraces a creative approach alongside the teaching of core discipline skills and knowledge requires a cultural shift in the approach of the Higher Education sector.
Most academic teachers today followed single discipline subjects themselves which focused on a knowledge-based curriculum and traditional assessment approaches of exams and assignments.
To expect those generations now teaching in higher education to suddenly change their approaches and adopt a culture where there is co-authored student-centred curriculum without substantial training and support is unrealistic.
Early in my first University teaching role I expressed my enthusiasm for revolutionising the student curriculum, and a colleague responded, ‘Richard, you need to understand that when it comes to changing the University, we work in a Geological time frame.’
UNESCO 2030 Agenda: Curriculum Transformation
In the paper entitled CURRICULUM IN TRANSFORMATION MODE Rethinking curriculum for the transformation of education and education systems (September 2023) published by UNESCO, author Renato Opertti, raises the question of how Universities should address the need for a transformed curriculum as an outcome of the World Higher Education Conference in Barcelona in 2022:
The goal of the Conference was “to reshape ideas and practices in higher education to ensure sustainable development for the planet and humanity,” and to that end, “to offer new knowledge, innovative ideas, and creative alliances, and to produce an enlarged and reinvigorated coalition of the global higher education community in favour of the 2030 Agenda for Development”[iv]
The conference focused on the need for a complete transformation of the University curriculum, and on the influence which Universities can have on curriculum delivery for all stages of education.
The conference delegates were encouraged to recognise the extent to which the very pressing current challenges within the world, especially in such areas as the environment, world poverty, increased conflict between nations and the existential threat to humanity in the growth of artificial intelligence and other technologies required them to consider how future University curriculum can address these challenges with their students:
The Conference communicated to governments and higher education institutions the pressing need for transformation in order to face the double challenge of bolstering education’s sustainability and relevance, as well as rethinking the foundations, substance, and implications of its engagement with societal transformation.[v]
For Opertti, a truly transformative curriculum must develop students as active participants in their educational experience rather than merely passive consumers of knowledge:
Students’ freedom to make curriculum choices rests on an understanding of them as producers, debaters, disseminators, and implementers of ideas and knowledge, with the aim of enabling them to meet the many complex challenges that are not presented to us in the form of tidy discipline-specific packages. A renewed consideration of the student’s role is simultaneously an act and a demonstration of trust in their ability to use their freedom to create.[vi]
Universities already recognise the need for such a student-centred learning approach. Nevertheless, the persistence of the subject discipline structures within Universities can work against the aspirations to develop a more creative curriculum.
For students, the University experience can still be be one that is designed for them by others and any attempts to change this are hampered by established frameworks, as Opertti suggests:
Progress toward education that seeks to integrate the sciences and humanities, such as STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) along with the support of a humanistic approach, conflicts with inflexible curriculum ideas and practices in terms of the ways teaching, learning, and assessment processes are organized.[vii]
Student-Centred Curriculum
Any survey of undergraduate courses on the UK University application site UCAS shows that ‘tidy discipline-specific packages’ of curriculum delivery still dominate in the courses offered by HE institutions. Significant practical challenges exist for developing new courses that are reflective of the complex challenges of society, as UNESCO recognises:
It has led us to ask whether education systems provide students with the frameworks and tools they need for independent, competent, and responsible performance as individuals, citizens, workers, entrepreneurs, and members of different groups and communities. It is no longer just a matter of focusing curricular and pedagogical discussions on modifying the content of lesson plans and programmes. It is worth examining the logic, appropriateness, and impact of educational approaches that are based on the accumulation of knowledge without clear prioritization or meaningful connections between different areas of knowledge, preventing students from appropriating, contextualizing, using, and sharing them.[viii]
For Opertti and UNESCO, the only way in which this creative experience can be developed within a transformed curriculum is to ensure that both students and academic teachers join together to become cooperative participants in the creation of their learning experience. The goal for the future curriculum is to foster equal involvement and equal responsibility – what has elsewhere been called a change of role for the academic from being the ‘sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide on the side’:
Curriculum transformation entails a profound realignment of roles in two complementary spheres, helping to broaden communities’ perspectives on education. We must embrace the challenge of positioning both students and teachers as co-agents and co-developers of the curriculum—with both sides involved and responsible—rather than envisioning the teacher’s role as one of merely conveying knowledge and the student’s as one of passively receiving that knowledge.[ix]
Academics accept and recognise the need to engage students more actively and directly in their programme experience and have been seeking to support their students in becoming owners of their educational journey. Universities are also seeking to achieve the ‘interdisciplinarity’ which UNESCO believes is central to developing a transformed landscape in its reference to a second phase of transition for the University curriculum:
The second transition raises the enormous, urgent challenge of moving from education anchored in traditional, hierarchical disciplinary divisions to a more holistic model consistent with a vision of the student as an individual, prioritizing students’ comprehensive education with a focus on challenges and issues. As a complement to the second transition, the third involves moving from silo-based disciplinary approaches to transdisciplinarity in the way we cover issues, as well as in the way we organize course offerings and educational environments and experiences.[x]
Unfortunately, there are significant practical obstacles to creating a new experience for students which can make it difficult for Universities to foster a truly innovative and multidisciplinary curriculum.
These systemic challenges must be recognised and addressed if Universities want to create a curriculum that fosters wider skills beyond those of subject knowledge and competence and puts the student at the heart of the learning experience.
The Technology Landscape for Curriculum Change
To support Universities achieve the goal of more student-centred, flexible and creative programmes requires not just a transformation in the culture of curriculum design but also in the technology adopted to support the curriculum.
Most UK Universities operate their courses through a range of student record systems (most commonly Tribal SITS or Ellucian BANNER) that manage the student enrolment processes and are core platforms for the student journey. In turn these systems are connected to a plethora of student lifecycle technologies within Universities.
These include assessment and marking systems, learning management systems (such as Blackboard, Moodle, or Canvas), timetabling systems (such as CELCAT or SCIENTIA), CRM systems (Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce), student portals and course websites amongst many other systems and data integrations.
These technologies often require courses to be structured in a pre-defined way to form the stable foundation for managing the student journey. These structures are used to align both the funding of students and the awarding of academic credit.
University Finance and HR systems also have designated data structures established to ensure staffing is resourced and statutory data returns can be completed. These systems can place boundaries around designated budget holders within faculties and departments.
It can therefore become difficult to accommodate and manage programme complexity within these systems when course design moves away from a single subject-based offering taught in a designated department or school. Even pathway awards and joint honours courses can present difficulties for these core systems and often involve manual workarounds for those managing the systems. Once a programme moves beyond certain parameters it becomes very difficult to manage within these often inflexible systems.
Universities are currently involved in costly and protracted transformation projects to overhaul these outdated systems. This activity is motivated by the desire to create a much more flexible, digitally enabled student journey with seamless integration between systems.
To achieve the stated goal of UNESCO for Universities to:
Foster open systems that build bridges and promote interinstitutional partnerships in order to address the challenges of today and tomorrow—challenges whose complexity and global scale transcends local borders and institutions working in silos.[xi]
Requires innovative technology that is far more flexible than currently exist in most universities. Such technology could allow academics, students, alumni, employers, entrepreneurs, artists and others to contribute to programme design and achieve the STEAM agenda.
This technology, supported by AI, could take the complex datasets generated from innovative course design and apply LLM to translate that data into a format that can be managed within the university systems. It would remove the manual work required to align the data from these courses with the record systems, timetabling, Learning Management System (LMS) and make it possible to create truly student-centred programmes which are aligned to systems for the first time.
At present such an approach is simply not feasible within the vast majority of Universities across the world because established system and funding structures present barriers to achieving the goals of a flexible curriculum.
Future Horizons Education is exploring how AI technologies can help Universities to achieve transformed course design through new data management processes that directly address these systemic limitations to innovation.
Contact us to find out more at futurehorizonseducation.com
Richard Knapp (2024)
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY, [Accessed 19/01/2024]
[ii] youtube/iwlhZmVXHww, [Accessed 19/01/2024]
[iii] See reference in https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/01/15/we-need-steam-not-stem-education-to-prepare-our-kids-for-the-4th-industrial-revolution/?sh=56a828bb55fb, [Accessed 19/01/2024]
[iv] CURRICULUM IN TRANSFORMATION MODE Rethinking curriculum for the transformation of education and education systems, UNESCO (September 2023), Renato Opertti, p.88.
[v] Opertti, p.89.
[vi] Opertti, p.37.
[vii] Opertti, p.55.
[viii] Opertti, p.52.
[ix] Opertti, p.46.
[x] Opertti, p.89.
[xi] Opertti, p.88.
