Communicating Complexity To Prepare For Complexity

A trend in higher education is a stronger focus on the content of a study program as a whole rather than the individual courses that make up the program. The Norwegian university of science and technology (NTNU) has recently completed a large project, The future of technology studies (FTS), that attempt to describe how study programs should prepare students for a technological career in a rapidly evolving society. A central recommendation from the project is the necessity of an integrated, programdriven curriculum. Hence, there is a need for a useful description of the content at the program level. However, a typical description of the learning outcomes of a study program is very brief, often just a set of bullet points that is in no way sufficient to describe the complexity of a study program. Two study programs in physics and mathematics at NTNU are in the process of revising the study program following the recommendations of FTS. We found that the current framework for documenting the content of the study program is not sufficient. We are proposing a new scheme where the content is documented in a master document. Some new features of the master document that are typically not part of conventional program descriptions are: Specific target audience, not only what but also what not, and why and why not, using a natural language, and maintaining complete revision history.