Journey Making: Applying PSE Principles to Complex Curriculum Designs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a very interesting manuscript, which is very well written, is clear and concise. I recommend publication without any further changes or revision.

Author Response

Thank you to the reviewer for their comments.

I have done another check on spelling and grammar to ensure it is all correct.

Reviewer 2 Report

As a submission to the special issue in memory of Professor R.W.H. Sargent, this paper focuses on education which greatly respect the contribution of Prof. Sargent as an influential educator who gave rise to a new area in Chemical Engineering. The authors propose applying PSE principles to complex curriculum design, which is of great interests in education. The reviewer highly appreciate this paper and recommends the acceptance for publication.

One minor question for the authors to consider; maybe they can further discuss on it to let audience understand more. The key idea of this paper is to apply PSE principles in curriculum design. Can they point out  how the current education system lacks in terms of the PSE principles for comparison? Also it would be nice if the authors can give some data to support the effects of applying the PSE principles in the design.

Author Response

Thank you to the reviewer for their comments.

1. We have gone through the paper carefully to check all grammar and spelling, as well as the choice of words in certain places. This was to help clarify the issues we are presenting and discussing.
2. In lines 20-21 we have noted the wide acceptance across many disciplines of the formal approach to curriculum design we present in this paper.
3. In lines 124-126 we have expressed where PSE principles play a formative role in driving integrative curricula.
4. Lines 174-176 were restated to emphasize the role of integration of outcomes across learning units. Learners build their competencies incrementally.

In terms of the lack in the current approaches for curriculum design, we have added a number of comments:

1. In lines 193-198 we have added the comment about fragmentation in personalized curriculum design due to inadequate understanding of knowledge integration across the whole curriculum. Also, we have noted the possible slow fragmentation of curricula over time through the inability of seeing how changes affect other connected unit. What we have created through using PSE principles is a way of seeing the flow of knowledge topics across time and space, as well as clearly designing assessment strategies that provide good evidence of attainment levels for students. This is part of the 'constructive alignment' process needed to link ILOs with assessment strategies.

In terms of impacts seen from these developments we have done the following:

1. In lines 367-382 we have noted some of the important impacts of the work on key stakeholders such as staff, students and professional accreditation bodies.
2. In lines 391-395 we note the wider adoption of these curriculum design developments across numerous university disciplines attesting to the impact of the ideas presented and the benefit seen in using such formal approaches. The utility of the approach is seen in the wide range of disciplines that have used the approaches described in this paper.

In lines 398-399 we changed the wording to make the final sentence much clearer.

Thank you.