Page 86 - FSTE A5 Handbook

Chapter Six
The Way Forward

Introduction

As discussed in previous chapters, the 3+3+4 higher education curricular reform has emerged
from the priorities laid down by the UGC, which stipulated that the additional year in the four
year undergraduate programmes should not be devoted to further academic specialization in
a disciplinary or professional subject (UGC, 2005), but, instead, each university would need to
develop its own version of GE. An inter-institutional GE initiative involving the eight UGC-funded
universities under the auspices of the Fulbright Hong Kong General Education programme was
inaugurated in 2008 (Jaffee, 2011; Logan & Curry, 2015; Xing, Ng & Cheng, 2013), signifying the
formal recognition of GE in the core curriculum of higher education in Hong Kong. Despite the
differences in the GE models adopted among the universities, curriculum development is the
common and central activity of any learning institution. Therefore, curriculum development
and a common understanding of GE will be elaborated in this chapter, followed by a deliberation
on GE as fundamental academic training and as a means to foster Outcome-based Approach
to Credit Transfer that maximizes both articulation opportunities and learning experiences for
the students.
Models for Curriculum Development

There are two prominent models for curriculum development. The first model is the “process
model” which was developed by Lawrence Stenhouse (1975), which focuses on the active role
of students in exploring knowledge at their own pace. Stenhouse advocated that the journey
to the end of the course could be more important than the end product. Students should take
an active role and use their own initiatives. He further argued that curriculum should be used
as a guideline and should not be too dictatorial. Curriculum evaluation is an integral part of
curriculum development.

The second model is the “objectives model” which has been seen as the product approach
to curriculum development and the early form of outcome-based model (Tyler, 1949). Ralph
Tyler, an influential advocate of this model suggested that a curriculum ought to address the
following questions: What are the aims and objectives of the curriculum? Which learning
experiences will help achieve the aims and objectives? How should the experiences be arranged
to make the curriculum effective? How should the curriculum be evaluated? Although the
two models are philosophically different, they both consider evaluation as a necessary and
essential component of a curriculum. This was exactly what the study reported in this book
attempted to do. It was a formative evaluation of the implementation of General Education
programmes in higher education that was primarily focused on the articulation experience of
the first cohort of students in the 3+3+4 education reform.

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