IF YOU PLEASE, DRAW ME A RESILIENT CURRICULUM!

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted Higher Education as a whole, and the various educational institutions. It resulted in unexpected circumstances and unavoidable trade-offs to ensure that the curricula became more agile and flexible. Resiliency is also now a cornerstone, in order to navigate the disruptive change with the high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Ten universities in South-East Asia and three in Europe have since 2018 been engaged in a project aimed at improving the quality of their STEM programmes. In the context of this capacity building framework, this paper outlines a curriculum design workshop to stimulate curriculum transformations for VUCA contexts. The paper shares insights into facilitating international collaboration, which enabled different perspectives and representations of an original curriculum to emerge. The value of online tools as a way of promoting international collaboration and curriculum development is also discussed. The approach is based on a serious games model, to train curriculum designers to better embrace change, to collaborate and work across cultures. It is transferable to locally support the future transformation of programmes, by sharing and challenging ideas. Target participants are University programme leaders, deans, educational quality managers, accreditation bodies, curriculum heads and council stakeholders, as well as partners from industry, and even students. The main objectives and phases of the collaborative workshop are presented, followed by implications and recommendations aimed at developing a Resilient Curriculum framework.