Back to the Future: The higher education curriculum in the 21st century

This paper begins by reviewing some of the dramatic changes which have been taking place in higher education in recent years and which are disrupting the traditional identities of place, of time and of the scholarly and student communities. These are producing for the 21st century a higher education system which operates under a greater variety of conditions than ever before (part-time/full-time, work-based/institution-based, face-to-face/ delivered at a distance, etc.) and which brings with it a student experience and an informal curriculum, which are both changed and increasingly diverse. The paper then looks more specifically at the competing epistemologies which are struggling to shape the formal undergraduate curriculum of the 21st century: the deconstruction of the subject, as reflected in, for example, the modularisation of the curriculum; the cross-curricular 'key' skills movement; the learning through experience movement and the shift of the seat of learning outside the academy; the profoundly disruptive potential of web-based learning. It observes too, however, the continuing power of the subject as a form of academic and organisational identity and the way in which the current dynamics of the research assessment exercise, the Quality Assurance Agency subject review process and even the Higher Education Funding Council's strategy for teaching and learning are working to reinforce the subject as the unit of organisation in higher education. It is this that prompts the hint in the title that the future may contain elements of familiarity as well as radical change.