Impact of Technological Advancement on the Higher Education Curriculum and Program Development

Abstract

The current educational structure was created in response to the demands of an industrial society, which, alongside workers, needed an elite of highly educated professionals. The knowledge revolution accelerated this trend: professionals are now not only the people who “have” the knowledge, but they should be also able to find it quickly and efficiently, and have the skills to apply knowledge in new situations, extending the scope of their initial field of expertise. With massive growth of free open educational resources, knowledge became available and accessible to everyone with a simple Internet connection. All these conditions currently call into question the role and operationalization of educational processes in Higher Education, since universities are no longer the one central source of knowledge generation. In this chapter, the authors analyze the current situation in Higher Education, in terms of why a demand for transformation of educational models has been almost entirely unable to generate sustainable changes in curriculum development. Aside from theoretical foundations, the authors also analyze literature and what the practitioners have to say in that respect. The ultimate goal of this chapter is to set the basis for an analytical framework for discussions about the transformative process of Higher Education in order to be able to bring curriculum development a step forward, in a sustainable way.