Navigating Curriculum Alignment through Workshops: A University of Adelaide Initiative

Curriculum alignment is one of those things that looks straightforward on paper and turns out to be surprisingly complex in practice. Earlier this year, our Online Program Team at the University of Adelaide took on the challenge of aligning two programs — Health Service Management and International Business — to meet both academic standards and industry expectations.

What started as a documentation audit ended up being a revealing exercise in stakeholder engagement, shared vocabulary, and iterative improvement.

The starting point: incomplete documentation

When we first reviewed the program-level documentation for both programs, it became clear that several areas were either incomplete, inconsistent, or hadn't been updated to reflect recent changes in the curricula. Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) weren't always traceable to individual assessments. Some course-level objectives had drifted from their stated program-level intent. Graduate attribute mapping was patchy.

This kind of documentation gap is common — not through negligence, but because programs evolve over time through multiple hands, and alignment documentation is rarely anyone's primary responsibility. It accumulates debt the way codebases do.

The workshop approach

Rather than treating this as a compliance exercise (fill in the gaps, tick the boxes), Learning Designers Rosemarie Foneska and Danielle Rhianna Lemieux took a more collaborative approach: bring the stakeholders — academic staff, program directors, and professional staff — into workshops where the alignment work could happen in dialogue, not in isolation.

The workshops served several purposes:

Surfacing tacit curriculum knowledge — academic staff often hold implicit understanding of how their course fits into the broader program that isn't documented anywhere. Workshops gave that knowledge a place to land.
Establishing shared language — "graduate skills", "industry alignment", and "learning outcomes" meant slightly different things to different people. Working through real examples together helped build a common vocabulary.
Identifying duplication and gaps — in breakout groups, staff could see across the program map in ways they couldn't from within their individual courses. This surfaced both topic repetition and places where important skills weren't covered anywhere.

What we learned

A few things stood out from the process:

Clarity of objectives matters more than you think. When learning outcomes are vague, everyone assumes they mean what they want them to mean. The alignment work forced specificity — and specificity revealed where the program was strong and where it wasn't.

Stakeholder engagement is the work. The documentation is an artefact of the conversations, not the other way around. Programs that are "aligned on paper" but without genuine buy-in from academic staff tend to drift back toward misalignment over time.

Setbacks are information. What looked like a setback early in the process — discovering the extent of the documentation gaps — turned into the most useful thing that happened. It gave the project a clear scope and a rationale that all stakeholders could see.

The outcome

Both programs are now better mapped: graduate attribute coverage is traceable, assessment is more clearly aligned to program-level outcomes, and the documentation reflects what the programs actually do, not an aspirational version of them.

The bigger win, though, was the process itself. Faculty who had never worked across courses together had built relationships and a shared understanding of their programs. That's harder to measure, but it outlasts any document.