Overview

It has long been known that what occurs in the classroom – how a course is delivered – has a major impact on student outcomes.   Increasingly, it is also evident that how faculty structure the curriculum itself – how courses required for degree completion are sequenced and how recommended student workloads are balanced each semester -- can substantially impact student success including retention and graduation rates and time to degree.

An overview of the concept of ‘curricular complexity,’ a measure that quantifies prerequisite and corequisite relationships among courses in a degree program was discussed at the October 1, 2020 Town Hall.  It also provides a survey of recent research demonstrating how curricular complexity can be correlated with student success, including retention and graduation rates. Examples of curriculum maps, generated by an online tool, will be used to illustrate how curricula that are unintentionally complex, or not optimally balanced across the semesters, can dramatically hinder degree progression, and suggests strategies for reducing curricular complexity. This session also introduces a NMSU initiative designed to support faculty and departments in analyzing their curricular structures and, eventually, in optimizing course sequencing in their degree programs and thus improving program outcomes at NMSU.  This initiative is led by Dr. David Smith, guided by a Curricular Analytics Steering Committee, and is part of APLU’s Powered by Publics initiative, in which NMSU is participating. 

Materials

• Reinvention Collaborative Panel Discussion (January 15, 2020) 
• Presentation (from the October 1, 2020 Town Hall)
• Presentation (from the October 6, 2020 NMSU LEADS with Data Town Hall)
• This resource page (Microsoft Teams) has instructions on how to add additional programs to the online complexity site.
• Reinvention Collaborative’s 5-minute video introduction
• Accessing the Online Tool
  1. Sign up for access to the Curricular Analytics tool 
  2. Once you sign up/sign in, select Dashboard, and click on either Curricula or Degree Plans in the menu to see a table of NMSU degree programs that have been analyzed to date.
  3. Click on the program name to see the graph and curricular complexity score for each program. The higher the score, the more complex the curriculum.

Degree Programs on Curricular Analytics Website