https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7426-3474
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ABSTRACT
Universities should increasingly collaborate with industries and international counterparts to meet the needs of students, businesses and other stakeholders. However, the literature has not provided a comprehensive response to these aspects of curriculum development. This study has two objectives: to propose a method of curriculum content development in higher education according to the stakeholder-centered quality assurance model and to verify this method based on a case study of a course on the green and digital transformation of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as a new development trend. Based on the collaboration of institutions from five EU countries, including faculties and students from four universities, representatives of SMEs, non-governmental organizations and quality assurance institutions, a curriculum development process is proposed, and tested, and then, its implications are discussed. Including the perspectives of different international stakeholders, and integrating qualitative and quantitative methods, the process of curriculum content development is created. It consists of three stages: (1) the initial content proposition, (2) the initial modules and unit proposals, and (3) the final curriculum content. This process benefits from considering the viewpoints of diverse educational stakeholders and ensuring international consistency in curriculum content. While testing this process, the program content in the field of green and digital transformation of SMEs is created, and divided into four education modules, each consisting of three units, with all together 29 topics. Both the process of developing new curriculum content and the program for the green and digital transformation of SMEs can be implemented in the business higher education context.
Acknowledgements
This paper has been prepared and data collected as a part of the Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Partnerships project 'Fostering Digital and Green Transformation in SMEs', 2021-1-PL01-KA220-HED-000027531. The project has been financed from the funds of the European Union.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/structural-business-statistics/information-on-data/small-and-medium-sized-enterprises, Accessed July 4, 2023.
2 This statistics is based on the correlation coefficients of all questions from the survey with the overall score of this scale. Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient normally ranges between 0 and 1. George and Mallery (Citation2016) provide the following interpretation: ‘α > .9 – excellent, α > 0.8 – good, α > 0.7 – acceptable, α > 0.6 – questionable, α > 0.5 – poor, and α<0.5 – unacceptable’. As Taber indicates (2018) ‘Alpha is widely used by authors in science education to represent the reliability, or the internal consistency, of an instrument or an instrument scale in relation to a particular sample or subsample of a population’.