Navigating through COVID-19 complexity

An assessment-centered transdisciplinary approach for internationalizing the curriculum

Authors

Abstract

COVID-19 has led to tremendous stress on curriculum design for frontline academics at the course level. Australian universities are struggling with the complexities of meeting domestic and international students’ diverse needs, their university’s quality teaching standards, and the government’s recent higher education reforms that focus primarily on national, rather than global, priorities. This study proposes an assessment-centered transdisciplinary approach (ACTA) to address these needs and to ensure continuation of an internationalized curriculum despite the national focus of the reforms. ACTA at a course level not only motivates students to learn, but also enhances their understanding of competence by focusing curriculum effort on assessment, with resources, support and evaluation built around it, which benefits both domestic and international students. ACTA will also ensure a minimum standard for shortening courses with modularization and takes into account student feedback in course redevelopment for more sustainable curriculum design.       

Author Biography

  • Jasper Kun-Ting Hsieh, James Cook University

    Jasper Hsieh, PhD, is an Educational Devsigner at James Cook University. He was an Educational Developer at University of New South Wales from 2017-2020. His research explores the relational phenomena between International Education, Second Language Acquisition, Pedagogy and Sociology of Education. He recently published an academic mongraph (by Routledge) on nine Taiwanese international students’ identity movements across contexts and over time. Jasper welcomes research collaborations with colleagues from other countries.

Published

2021-08-31

Issue

Section

COVID-19 and Global Higher Education (Completed)

How to Cite

Navigating through COVID-19 complexity: An assessment-centered transdisciplinary approach for internationalizing the curriculum. (2021). Comparative & International Education Series. https://ojed.org/cies/article/view/2926