Information management requirements for precision education

Nabil Kamel
Arab Open University, Egypt Branch
Cairo, Egypt

This paper addresses the information management requirements of a new approach to curriculum design called precision education. This approach aims to provide accreditable, but highly targeted and customizable, curricula. To be accreditable, a standardization of the intended learning outcomes (ILOs) is proposed. Issues of delivery and vehicle are separated from the ILOs. For example, a course on object-oriented programming can be delivered face-to-face or online, using Java or C++ (vehicle). It can also be taught using a variety of textbooks, development environments, problems and examples. Courses and programmes can then be validated by considering only how they meet their ILOs. In order to overcome the potentially high resource requirements that can arise due to the customizability requirement of this approach, a new model for IT-mediated inter-institution collaboration is proposed as an integral part of a new methodology.

Unlike career planning, which has been criticized for its rigidity in response to rapid changes in domain knowledge — especially in the technological fields — the new approach is incrementally adaptable and incorporates the general interests of the students, their varying and evolving backgrounds, their aptitudes, and their broader career goals.

This new approach is inspired by precision irrigation and borrows concepts of service-oriented architectures (SOA) in software engineering. Precision education represents a new curriculum design model that incorporates elements of both product-oriented and process-oriented models as presented by Ralph Tyler, Benjamin Bloom and Lawrence Stenhouse. The paper outlines the requirements of the core information system infrastructure needed to support this approach: curriculum customization, student enrolment, programme accreditation, and industry involvement in study plans and to coordinate the delivery of the content across multiple institutions.