Models, methods and software prototype to support the design, evaluation, and analysis in the curriculum management of competency-based for higher education

Many higher education institutions spend decades transforming their content-based to competency-based curricula. Furthermore, there is a clear tendency to improve summative to formative assessment, which demonstrates the learning process of students by measuring their learning outcomes. However, combining curriculum design, evaluation, and analysis of competencybased educational processes is a difficult task to implement in practice. For the design, it is necessary to understand a whole conceptual framework, also to comply with restrictions of the University, Faculty and Academic Unit, define clear models and methods for the curricular reform processes. Then, to implement them, technological support is required to make a more detailed evaluation and analysis. The lack of technological tools to support these processes makes it even more difficult. This work shows the work carried out so far in the framework of the curricular reform of the programs of the Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad del Valle and led by the Escuela de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Computación (EISC). In this review of conceptual references for the development of a curriculum management proposal that involves the definition of a curriculum design method supported by a software prototype to manage the processes of curriculum management in the medium term. This paper first shows a systematic review of software models and applications used to support the design, evaluation, and analysis of courses that may be useful in higher education. These models and applications are focused on the design, the formative evaluation by competences and the analysis of the learning outcomes of the students in the learning processes. Second, the elements of the review are identified for the construction of a curriculum design model, including the definition of a new evaluation system that facilitates the analysis of competency-based learning. A particular challenge of this model is to obtain a quantitative grade depending on the detailed evaluation of the student’s learning outcomes. For the EISC, it is also necessary to link the learning objectives of the new curriculum to those proposed by the Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013). Finally, in the future work, the model should serve to produce learning analytics that allows measuring the level of the program and academic unit. Third, the proposed model for EISC curriculum management and advances in the software prototype is presented. Finally, validation is presented at the ESIC, where some proffesors designed their courses using the proposed model.