Insights for curriculum design from design research

The paper considers how research in product/process design methodologies can be used to design engineering curricula. Following the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) framework for product design, we show how the curriculum design task can be separated into functionality of the curriculum, student behaviors and course structures. We then describe possible ways in which such a design could help us explore the possibilities of designing different types of curricula with the same functionality so that we could develop flexible, fault tolerant, scalable curricula that evolves with changing circumstances. These requirements are not generally included as curriculum design criteria and an approach that highlights the role of “robustness” would be useful.