Higher education has to prepare students for a challenging future. According to recent studies, cognitive skills are rapidly gaining importance in professional environments (World Economic Forum, 2023). In addition to professional skills, higher education has to educate on problem solving, reasoning, decision making and creativity to ensure that professionals can flexibly adjust to rapid environmental changes (Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2012). It is irrelevant to only focus on the transfer of knowledge, rather on how students can use this information in their profession. In addition it has been argued that students have to learn in an authentic context to facilitate better transfer for the student (Schlusmans et al., 2001; Kelchtermans et al., 2010, Willcox, 2016; Van Petegem et al., 2015; Dochy, 2015) while learning knowledge, attitudes and skills in an integrated way (Van Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2013). Therefore, we need to consider curricula as much more than a grid of school subjects or courses (UNESCO, 2021). As members of an educational development unit of a Belgian higher education institution we gave careful thought to the process of building curricula that are future proof for the challenges ahead.

We asked ourselves the following question: How do we design supported and sustainable curricula that are directed towards professional competencies and learning outcomes (LO)? To date, most literature focuses on the design of single courses and general pedagogical principles but fails to inform on how to practically designing complete outcome based curricula on professional higher education level. Our proposal wants to bridge this gap through design science research (Kaipia et al., 2017; van Aken and Romme, 2009) at a university of applied sciences in Belgium.

We developed 4 design propositions leading to a methodology to design sustainable curricula directed towards LO in higher education. This results in a practical toolkit for curriculum development based on 10 process steps to guide professionals towards developing future proof and supported curricula that are not easily outdated. Furthermore, when implementing a LO oriented curriculum, the relevance, sequence and relationship between courses have become more explicit for students and instructors.

Our methodology integrates well-established insights from the literature as well as own field tested interventions based on our long term experience in curriculum design (Romme, 2003). Doing so, we connect practice and academia through the development of actionable knowledge grounded in the empirical evaluation of how designs work in the field (van Aken et al., 2009). Our process is tested in practice for the challenging curriculum design process.

Keywords: Curriculum development, curriculum design, higher education, learning outcomes, outcome based curriculum, design thinking, educational development, toolkit.