Studying the development of an online course on Curriculum : implications for the students' workload in light of the Bologna principles

ECER 2014 "The Past, the Present and Future of Educational Research in Europe" will take place at the University of Porto from 1 - 5 September 2014.

After having taught a course on Curriculum Theory and Development (CTD) via face-to-face instruction to undergraduate students of Basic Education for many years, in the academic years 2011/12 and 2012/13 I taught the same course via e-learning, at the University of the Azores (UA), Portugal. Considering that the full virtualization of a course is still a rare phenomenon at the UA, I decided to use Curriculum Design Research (CDR) to study the development of the above-mentioned online version of the course on CTD, which, from now on, will be designated as CTD-O. CDR usually follows a prototyping approach, whereby tentative versions of the product being developed are evaluated and revised in a systematic way through a combination of different kinds of evaluation criteria and different evaluation techniques. Accordingly, the quality of CTD-O has been evaluated in the light of validity, practicality and effectiveness criteria, through the application of some techniques that are common in CDR (Nieveen, 1997): micro-evaluation, screening, expert appraisal, and tryout. The outcomes provided some evidence of a slow and resistant adaptation to some principles of the Bologna process, whose implementation has been facilitated by the virtualization of the course.