Mapping Out Curriculum Development: Your Guide to Developing Trainings and Courses

"A well-designed curriculum is core to any training program."

This step-by-step guide provides trainers with ideas and tips for developing a curriculum for media and journalism education trainings. It can be used to develop trainings for journalists and media managers and to develop media and information literacy trainings for the general public. Outlined over four steps, the curriculum guide is designed to help in the implementation of an outcomes-based and interactive training programme that is aligned with the needs and competencies of the intended participants.

As explained in the guide, "The curriculum is the core of any training program. Developing a curriculum properly guarantees that a program addresses the needs of its target group, while thinking about program structure ensures that proposed training formats fit into their lives." The goal is to ensure that the curriculum helps trainees develop new skills in addressing fundamental changes their media ecologies are going through, and in this way promote innovations in their media outlets.

The four steps in the curriculum development process are as follows:

1. Outlining the scope of the training programme - The process starts by gathering a diverse group of stakeholders to identify the challenges their media ecology faces. Using methods of human-centred design, they map out how a training programme can provide answers and what kind of training formats fit the priority group.
2. Drafting the training concept - The next step, which involves the training provider and their team, focuses on making decisions on topics and formats. Here, they define their priority group's specific training needs using a storyboard approach.
3. Sprinting towards a training design - In this step, the team defines learning outcomes and develops a training structure with methods, formats, tools, and materials. This structure is compiled in training matrices.
4. Enhancing quality through evaluation and adaptation - This final step looks at testing the training programme at the end of the curriculum development process. It offers guidance on how to get feedback from trainees in order to make trainings even better for the next iteration.

The process outlined in the guide is intended for short training modules as well as for curricula of bigger programmes and can be adapted to the needs and circumstances of the trainers and participants.