A case study of curriculum development: Backward or forward/central design?

Nowadays universities in Vietnam have begun to update their curricula by adopting a backward design with a focus on students’ learning outcomes to replace the old-fashioned forward model. However, to have a constructive alignment is a problem they have to face. This situation has prompted this case study research in May 2020, intending to examine a curriculum to find out whether it is coherent in terms of its main components – objectives, syllabus, methodology, and evaluation. The findings of the study indicate that for this case, although the curriculum was claimed to be of a backward design with learning outcomes as program objectives, it turned out to follow a forward one with more focus on knowledge transfer than competency development. In particular, as the program learning objectives were still written according to knowledge transmission, it was not constructively aligned with the three main components of syllabus, methodology and evaluation: The syllabi were mainly based on the experience of the experts in the field or syllabus designers, the innovation of the methodology as directed by the university with a shift of focus from the lecturer to learners was still interpreted rigidly and mechanically, and the evaluation of student learning was generally claimed to be criterion-referenced only without any elaboration for each syllabus.