Initiating curriculum revision: Exploring the practices of educational developers

Curriculum revision is an important part of academic work. Despite theoretical literature on curriculum development and design, there is a scarcity of literature available for either academic staff or novice educational developers on the initiation of this curriculum revision process. This study, therefore, set out to explore the practices of experienced Irish and UK educational developers working in this area. A mixture of in‐depth interviews followed by a semi‐structured questionnaire was used to explore the approaches of these educational developers. The results suggest that curriculum revision tends to benefit from initial, intensive dialogue between educational developers and academic staff, and that such initial interaction provides an important understanding of the context in which the curriculum revision occurs. This paper highlights that despite some suggested starting points at programme and module level, educational developers should be open and flexible in their approach to this activity.