Course Redesign Toolkit

Transforming Higher Education for Social Change: a model from East Africa is a rigorous methodology of pedagogy and curriculum redesign that supports lecturers to rethink their teaching and to become facilitators of student-centred teaching – helping students learn how to think, not what to think. This improved learning experience fosters the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and allows for practical learning beyond the classroom that can improve a graduate’s employability. The model has been specifically designed to support lecturers and institutions in low resource settings.

The purpose of the Course Redesign for Significant Learning and Transformation toolkit is to enable academic or administrative staff, responsible for staff development within their institution, to facilitate a process of hands-on course redesign. The process is aimed at academic teaching staff, who teach mainly at the undergraduate course level.



The methodology adopts a two-layered approach to course redesign. Academic teaching staff start by conceptualising the content of their course; then crafting learning outcomes based on these concepts, instilling the hard and soft skills required in that discipline, then producing a course assessment plan and schedule of teaching and learning strategies, aligned to their course learning outcomes.



Throughout the course redesign process, academic teaching staff importantly embed the soft skills, capabilities and dispositions that their students will need to develop and master within that discipline. In addition, they are challenged to improve their own pedagogy to ensure that both their male and female students equally derive learning from their course and master the required gender knowledge and skills related to that discipline. These are the ‘power skills’ which employers, communities and students themselves are demanding, not only to enable students to become the experts they need to be, but to transform themselves and ultimately the world around them.

Our toolkits and online courses guide lecturers and institutions through a learning journey to transform their teaching and learning practice. Course redesign is the third step in this journey. Lecturers and institutions can follow the complete learning pathway from programme alignment to learning design, or engage with the individual elements that are most relevant to them.

To learn about the other stages of the learning journey, click here. To download a full set of PowerPoint slides for the workshop click here.