Curriculum life cycle

A curriculum is based on a set of values and beliefs about what students should learn; it is the axis about which learning and teaching revolve. In part values and beliefs are set by external agencies or by internal deliberation.

The guiding principle for curriculum design at Macquarie is constructive alignment. Constructive alignment means that what we ask students to do must relate to what we want them to learn; in other words the

• graduate capabilities
• aims of the course
• learning outcomes
• learning tasks
• assessments, and
• marking criteria

all relate to each other.