To develop a new course, your goal might be first to create a curriculum of the content to be taught in the subject area. That content can range from everything taught in a large school system to the content of one course at offered at a small language school.
The goal is to provide content that students need. And your job is to determine and define that content.
QuickTake:
For our purposes here, we define curriculum as the lessons and academic content taught in a school or in a specific course or program (reference).
You will find the term curriculum used in a variety of ways. Usually, from the big picture, all the courses and content of a program, down to being roughly equivalent to syllabus. Don’t worry too much about definitions as it is rare in non-college/university settings to get into the finer details of what is curriculum vs syllabus. In this course when we ask you to develop a curriculum or syllabus, we will carefully define the parameters of the task. We will provide a broader range of definition and function in Extended Concepts further below.
To develop a curriculum, we will attempt to determine:
- School/government requirements/standards
- The requirements of our customers (Who is paying for the course to be delivered?)
- The needs of our students
For numbers 1. and 2. the requirements are relatively easy to determine through interview and survey. For number 3. the same methods are useful, but students often don’t know what they will need in the future and it is the instructor’s responsibility to help determine those needs.
Instructors will find the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) a useful tool for building programs as well as for assessing student skill level. It is and is meant to be fairly general in scope, but does provide a well thought-out basis for development and assessment. While this is a European tool, it is just as useful for teachers and learners of American or International English.
Proceed to our CEFR page for useful tools for your assessment(s) related to building a curriculum.
Syllabus is defined as
