Specialisation and division of labour drive productivity across every aspect of modern economies and universities are no exception.
Programmes are broken down into modules each with separate convenors, while assessment belongs to individual units. In theory, curriculum maps ensure module consistency. On paper, this approach may work well; though a student’s lived experience of the curriculum may be quite different. Instead, they experience moving from one classroom to another writing assessment after assessment, without necessarily understanding how these connect.
Asking a typical student to explain what their programme is about is often enough to reveal the cracks in the system. Most students can describe modules individually but struggle to explain a wider intellectual direction. They remember assessments, marks, particular lecturers, and policies, but they do not always see how those elements connect into a cohesive academic journey.
That is not to say that individual modules are necessarily lacking in any respect. Most programmes contain excellent individual teaching, and this is supported by unit evaluations. The problem is elsewhere. A module can be perfectly internally coherent while failing to add value when offered with other modules.
Students notice repeated topics and a lack of bridges between modules. It is common for a lecturer to assume knowledge on a certain topic when such knowledge has never been covered properly. It is also common to have modules in the programme which reward experimentation and while others punish it. Some lecturers encourage use of AI while others treat it as misconduct, sometimes without clearly signposting their view to students. Thus, internally consistent modules can create an inconsistent student experience that staff are unaware of.
Nobody’s job, everyone’s problem
Most university roles assign individuals to working strictly within their own areas of responsibility.
Such individualist structures align well with cherished institutional values such as academic freedom and autonomy. Few roles are genuinely structured around fostering ongoing connections across the curriculum. Though programme leaders are formally responsible for ensuring course coherence, doing so effectively requires the cooperation and coordination with module convenors with differing views, pedagogies and assessment preferences.
Building consensus can be a very difficult process, especially when workloads are already stretched.
Widely used quality assurance systems can exacerbate these pressures. Internal moderation and external examining heavily focus on module level outcomes. An external examiner looks at a specific set of units, without being asked to check connections between modules and if they build on what came before. By focusing on evaluating quality within closed silos, universities might miss the gaps between them.
Perhaps the most obvious example of coordination failure at the programme-level is the bunching of deadlines that is so pervasive across the sector. Even though course-level assessment maps provide a straightforward tool to identify and address this problem, “cluster deadlines” continue to be a widely reported pain point reported in student surveys, showing a persistent lack of effective collective planning across teaching teams.
Academic freedom and autonomy are foundational principles in higher education that ensure curricula include diverse perspectives free from undue influence and censorship. These principles do not imply a laissez-faire approach to curriculum design, as is sometimes argued.
The expertise, effort and care that individual convenors put into the design of a module can impart a sense of individual ownership over a module. Such a mindset can cause people to perceive efforts at curriculum alignment as intrusions on academic freedom leading them to resist changes to content or assessment methods. Such absolutist views on academic freedom can harm the student experience.
Best before dates
Careful conversations about curriculum take place during programme validation and curriculum transformation meetings. But once these meetings are done, there is a tendency for people to return to research, teaching, marking, dissertation supervision, and all the other things competing for attention with tight deadlines. Even if programmes are coherent by design, over time changes to unit design and assessment can lead to curriculum drift.
A collection of well-intentioned but uncoordinated module changes can generate a disjoint curriculum. Fragmentation rarely comes from neglect, as most academics care deeply about student experience and learning. It slowly happens through workload pressures, institutional habits, and the difficulty of maintaining coherence in programmes.
Students notice when lecturers reference ideas introduced elsewhere. They notice when skills learned earlier become useful later. They notice when different modules appear to be pulling in the same direction. Those moments give students confidence that the curriculum has been developed with them in mind. Without these connections, a programme can feel fragmented, even when teaching quality at the module level is high.
Fixing this requires more than just launching another periodic review or rewriting the job description for programme leaders. Keeping a curriculum connected is a continuous task, requiring ongoing discussions between module convenors, course directors and academic leads. Though quality assurance and governance processes provide valuable formal oversight of the curriculum, these are no substitute to authentic engagement between members of faculty, which is often most effective in less formal settings. Universities need to consider programme integration as a real intellectual task, supporting programme leads to create the platforms for these conversations to occur.
Institutional incentives need to be aligned with how students experience a degree. As long as workload models, promotion paths and teaching awards only celebrate the success of single modules, that is where academics will focus their energies.
Making a real change means creating spaces where teams can own the student journey, rewarding collaborative design just as much as brilliant individual teaching.
