Cultivating curriculum resilience in higher educational institutions: a novel decision tool

The vulnerability of higher education institutions to unexpected crisis events was starkly illustrated by the COVID-19 crisis and suggests they must cultivate resilience capabilities as a strategic priority. The scholarship has recently begun focusing on the transformative power of curricula to stimulate solutions for interdisciplinary challenges such as resilience. We contribute to this emergent research stream using an action design research and mixed-methods approach to develop a decision tool to evaluate curriculum resilience (CR). In the first phase, we deduced a novel CR framework, depicting it as a process connecting four curriculum dimensions to four generic resilience properties. This framework comprises our main scholarly contribution and was informed by the literature and a survey conducted with international educational stakeholders (n = 35). We analyzed the survey results using the Wilcoxon-signed-rank test and thematic analysis for the quantitative and qualitative data, respectively. In phase 2, using a Delphi process (n = 25), we elaborated a second survey and refined it by consensus with expert educational stakeholders. The resulting survey tool probes attitudes and opinions of students, staff and program leaders regarding specific dimensions of CR. The survey lays the foundations for educational decision-makers to assess, monitor and improve CR and comprises the paper’s key contribution to practice.