As part of the external consultants visit to Tanzania we organised a curriculum design workshop with the staff of the University of Iringa Team Academy on 10th to 12th of February. The idea was to create the foundation for the curriculum that will later on be submitted to the Tanzanian University Commission for approval in order to start a full Team Academy program in October 2015 with a full throttle.
In the first morning, after checking in, we started to wonder what are the questions we should answer together. We came up with following questions:
- What is the name of our program?
- What is the output of our program? I.E. What the recent graduate knows and can do?
- What is the justification for our program? Why we consider this program important?
- What are the competences that our graduates will have? What are the levels of development in different competences?
- How do our team entrepreneurs (i.e. students) learn the competences and attitudes?
- What courses will we have?
- What approach and learning tools will we use in the courses?
- How do we assess the learning in this program?
- What kind of assignments should we have in our program?
In the afternoon we started to answer them, one by one. It took us three days, but by the end of it, we got through most of them. We did not dive into the details of the contents of the courses, but otherwise we covered everything.
I think, the most important thing in creating a new curriculum is the dialogue among the founders that creates the shared understanding about what we are doing and creating. The second issue is then to write it all out into the form of curriculum, which is the job we are doing right now.
Written by and pictures courtesy of Team Academy Senior Experts, TANZICT external consultants, Ville Keränen & Jukka Hassinen, Partus Ltd
TANZICT 