Academic practice in aligning curriculum and technologies

Aligning the curriculum elements of learning outcomes, teaching activities and assessment tasks is one of the strategies available to academics to help them adapt to the needs of diverse and ever-changing cohorts of students in technology-rich environments. While curriculum alignment is commonly represented in the literature, little is known about how academics approach this task of designing an aligned curriculum. A two-phase study was undertaken in an Australian research-intensive university to investigate the learning outcomes academics intend for their students, how these relate to the assessment strategies and choices of educational technologies. The results suggest that while academics intend higher order learning for their students, the assessment strategies they choose and the technologies they select may work to encourage lower order outcomes rather than targeting higher order processes.