The College Curriculum Information System: A Strategy for Planned Changing

There is a continual need for curricular change in higher education. In America's pluralistic society, rapidly accumulating knowledge and changing conditions create new trends, opportunities, needs and problems. Our pluralistic society's survival literally depends on the ability of institutions of higher education to educate and train individuals to deal with these new challenges. Correspondingly, the survival of each college or university ultimately depends on its continual demonstration of its relevant societal responsiveness. The chief vehicle for responsiveness to new challenges in higher education is a curriculum binded in traditional disjointed incrementalism and bound in ivory tower emulations. Management of curricular change in higher education is difficult, but possible through systemic development strategies. This paper presents an approach to planned curricular change in higher education. Change is operationally defined here as “purposive intervention into articulated congeries of dynamic university systems, in order to achieve appropriate outcomes….” The “purposive intervention” is founded on the development of a Curriculum Information System.