Curriculum Mapping

A student-centered curriculum map presents a visual landscape of learning intended to help students see how their learning journeys across courses and other learning opportunities integrate in a cohesive design. A program-level curriculum map represents a cohesive, collaborative vision of how a program helps students to learn, offering both educators and students a visual, collaborative space to contemplate the curriculum. In addition to communicating the interconnected relevance of a degree to students, curriculum maps help faculty to integrate and demonstrate evidence-informed continuous improvement.

Link to UMBC’s undergraduate or graduate curriculum mapping template collections for examples and templates of program, course, and assignment maps. For detailed instructions and examples see A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculum (Harrison & Williams 2024), or request a consultation or workshop.

Mapping as an Evidence-Informed, Continuous Improvement Process

Curriculum mapping helps educators to demonstrate and analyze their curricular design, that is, how they help students to achieve the desired learning results. It is the second part of the learning assessment loop.

To begin the ongoing process of curriculum mapping, educators articulate and align student learning outcomes; sketch how courses and other learning opportunities scaffold this learning; identify assignments with direct measures that challenge students to demonstrate their learning; and analyze and apply the learning results.

Mapping is an ongoing process that relies on faculty collaboration and deliberative dialogue, informed by learning evidence, to continuously improve student learning in programs and courses. Please contact us if you’d like help getting started: many UMBC faculty have participated in FDC-facilitated workshops (in person and online) to initiate, expand, or explore mapping.

In the video below, Peggy Re (Interim Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Professor in the Department of Visual Arts) details the curriculum mapping session at the Eighth Annual Provost’s Teaching & Learning Symposium, where colleagues explored UMBC’s curriculum, discovered common ground across disciplines, and identified “hidden” learning outcomes. Faculty and staff experts guided visitors through this live mapping experience.

Curriculum Mapping Templates

A curriculum map diagrams relationships between learning outcomes, learning opportunities, and the student learning that emerges. It shows how the parts of a program work together to help learners achieve the outcomes.

To sketch this journey, the mapping process engages the following elements:

Program-level student learning outcomes appear in the first column to form the rows of the matrix.
Program outcomes vertically align to institutional outcomes in the second column.
Student learning opportunities form the columns of the matrix.
A key defines the intersections between the learning outcomes (rows) and opportunities (columns) to show the level of learning and knowledge (columns).
Signature assignments measure formative program learning (and summative data for the learning opportunities).
Capstone and/or final course assessments measure summative program learning.

Notations for horizontal alignment, pedagogies, practices, initiatives, etc. can be added as needed.

Curriculum mapping contextualizes and connects closing-the-loop interventions; creates an ongoing record of the changes and discussions and data; highlights where potential interventions may be needed; creates a repository and system for storing data; and clarifies authentic data aggregation pathways.

Vertical and Horizontal Alignment

Vertical Alignment

Vertical alignment links institutional, program, and course outcomes

Curricular Alignment

Achieving integrated learning across programs requires vertical alignment through all levels:

UMBC’s Mission: Learning begins with the mission.
Institutional-Level & General Education Outcomes: UMBC’s Functional Competencies (FCs) operationalize the mission in five transferable skill sets.
Program-Level Outcomes: The FCs gain disciplinary focus when expressed in program-level learning outcomes.
Course-Level Outcomes: Course- and Assignment-level outcomes are measurable, and aggregation yields insights for improvement at each level.

Alignment allows faculty and staff to aggregate learning data across assignments and courses, discuss the results with colleagues, and collaborate on interventions at the course-, program-, and institutional-levels.

Common Ground for Integrated Learning

UMBC’s mission creates common ground for learning across the curriculum. Our institutional-level learning outcomes, called the General Education Functional Competencies express the mission in cognitive skills that students need to contribute to society:

Oral and Written Communication
Scientific and Quantitative Reasoning
Critical Analysis and Reasoning
Technological Competence
Information Literacy

When faculty align outcomes from the mission to the assignment, they can measure student learning in the assignment and lift the data to each level above for aggregation and comparison. In this way, faculty can use the data to close the loop to improve courses individually, or to collaborate on interventions to improve learning at the program- and institutional- levels.

Horizontal Alignment

Horizontal alignment, also referred to as horizontal coherence, aligns a curriculum across multiple courses or learning experiences within a program. Additionally, it allows programs to align to multiple sets of standards, for example through a crosswalk table. Many college programs must meet disciplinary accreditation standards. Social work, teacher education, engineering and information technology, psychology, allied health, and emergency medical service programs are just some of the courses of study that require specialized accreditation. Rather than creating new or different curriculum maps to meet multiple specific standards, horizontal alignment shows the overlap between the curricula being taught and the standards of the accreditation body.

Horizontal coherence also indicates the alignment between one program of study and a
different program of study, or between academic programs and co-curricular activities, or across several different disciplines within a college. Curriculum maps provide visual representations of these alignments and encourage collaboration, integrative learning, deliberative dialogues, and gap or overlap analysis. Horizontally aligned curriculum maps are tools that promote the integrity of student outcomes, stemming from the institutional mission, to connect multiple aspects of students’ college learning opportunities. Curriculum mapping reveals common ground across curricular and co-curricular programs. Both faculty and students can see the multiple opportunities to achieve institutional outcomes—in courses and activities—which diversifies and strengthens student learning experiences.

Links to Templates

UMBC Curriculum Map Template (Available upon request by contacting the FDC): Presents a sample curriculum map and template, so you can visualize student learning across your program. The revised and expanded 2022 Excel file also includes a course-level curriculum map template and example, and templates for rubrics and test maps.
Graduate Curriculum Map Templates (Available upon request by contacting the FDC): Presents a sample graduate curriculum map and template, so you can visualize student learning across your program. The revised and expanded 2022 Excel file also includes a course-level curriculum map template and example, rubric templates for courses and milestones, and aggregators to help you gather the results across the program.

If you have any questions or would like to get started mapping your course or program, please contact the FDC.

Text and graphics created by Jennifer M. Harrison, Ph.D.

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