How to guide potential curriculum changes: Comparing curriculums

Through bi-weekly posts, MA staff participating in the USO-project on internationalisation will share concrete teaching tools and activities through which we aim to enhance ‘tailor-made’ internationalisation.

This week: internationalisation of the curriculum: lessons from MA Psychology.

In the process of internationalisation, curriculum changes are almost inevitable. Think, for instance, about the changes in course material that go along with the language transition from Dutch to English. Or, the course content that has to shift its focus from the Dutch labour market to the international labour market. For this purpose, the MA Psychology programme has conducted a curriculum comparison to guide these potential curriculum changes. This article will describe the process of comparing the curriculums, so that other faculties can use this article as a guideline.

Step 1: Choose your universities

The curriculum of the master’s programme Clinical and Health Psychology at Utrecht University was compared to the clinical master programmes of three top ranked (QS World Rankings: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2016/psychology) universities in the world: University College London (Great-Britain), the University of British Columbia (Canada) and the University of New South Wales (Australia).

Step 2: What to compare?

These universities were compared in length of the programme, size and content of the courses, balance between the internship-thesis-courses and general learning goals and outcomes. The findings were presented in a comparison table. Regarding content, courses were categorised as an assessment course, a psychopathology course, or a therapy course.

Step 3: Going into detail

The individual courses of the master programmes of the three foreign universities were examined in full detail. A table was created, where foreign courses were displayed in the same row as the matching courses of the UU master’s programme. As diagnostic education is a large part of the master’s programme at Utrecht University, relevant bachelor courses were also considered.

Step 4: Conclusion

The general conclusion of the comparison table was that many of the courses taught in the foreign universities’ programmes were equal to courses taught in the bachelor at Utrecht University. The foreign Psychology masters contained far more theoretical and practical (skills-based) courses than Utrecht University.

Step 5: Repeat for Dutch universities

In addition to comparing UU to international universities, it is also relevant to know how our programme relates to Clinical Psychology master programmes of other Dutch universities. Therefore, a similar comparison was made between Utrecht University, Leiden University, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Groningen University. To do this, we repeated steps 1 till 4 again.

Some things to keep in mind when comparing courses

After reading these steps, you probably have an idea about how to compare courses amongst different universities. However, there are also some important things to keep in mind when comparing universities. The first things is that many Dutch master’s programmes are only one year, while many foreign universities have two-year programmes. To effectively compare the courses, some sort of conversion of the EC will have to take place. Also, the balance between the master’s programmes is often different. Consider for instance our MA Psychology programme. The balance between the courses, the internship and the thesis is roughly 33% for each part, whereas other programmes weight these components differentially.

 Conclusion

Engaging in this comparative process can not only help to identify any potential gaps in curriculum content, but importantly, can also highlight the relative strengths of one programme over another. This information could be used to promote the core distinguishing features of your own programme when attracting new students.

Alishia Williams