Tailor Your Curriculum with Ease
Looking for Better Control of Your Curriculum?
Although the basic structure, topics, and outcomes may be the same, the intricacies of every curriculum are different. While this means that every school, college, or university can imprint their own unique perspective on the curriculum, it does cause its problems.
Making changes to your documented curriculum means hours of laborious work, and ensuring all materials fall in line with the alterations elongates the process further. Even after you’ve made the changes, it can be difficult to demonstrate them to staff, which can lead to inconsistencies in how they teach the curriculum and cause confusion among students.
Thanks to Sofia, you can make immediate curriculum additions and alterations and use the platform to display them clearly to your staff.
Making Changes Made Easy
When you decide to make changes to a documented curriculum, it can lead to hours of paperwork. It doesn’t have to be that way. Sofia makes creating, organising, and maintaining your curriculum easy, ensuring changes and additions to the curriculum can be made instantly.
By accessing Sofia using an editor account, you are able to insert additional items into the curriculum, as well as edit existing modules. During the creation of new modules, Sofia provides clear dropdown menus that allow you to determine where it is positioned in the curriculum’s hierarchy, and which sub-modules it is connected to. When it comes to editing existing modules and how they’re connected, this can easily be done using the ‘edit tags’ button connected to each individual module.
Plan Next Year’s Curriculum in Advance
To improve results for students, refining the curriculum is an important end-of-year task. While most of the curriculum stays the same, minor edits can have major impacts and get the best out of learners. Replicating the curriculum in written documentation is an administrative nightmare, but using Sofia, you can duplicate the current curriculum and seamlessly make the necessary content changes for next year’s cohort.
To make year-specific changes, access Sofia through your editor account and select the relevant year, e.g. 2020/21. On screen, you will then see the curriculum specific to the chosen academic year. Rest assured that any changes you make to that year’s curriculum will not be reflected in the curriculum of any other year.
Once you are satisfied with the changes, select ‘Explore’ from the left-hand sidebar, choose the correct year from the dropdown menu, and you will see your changes have been reflected in the visual map of your curriculum.
Provide Key Contact Information for Students
It’s important for students to know who to contact when they need additional support with their studies. When contact information is provided verbally, in written communications, or via email, it is often forgotten, misplaced, or ignored. Sofia allows administrators to add key contact information for each module, ensuring students always have support close at hand.
In Sofia, an editable key contact box is located next to each module. Prior to the information being added, the following text overlays the box: ‘Who is the teacher/head of this [module name]?’ Click the pencil icon next to the text, and the editing area will appear. In the space provided, you can add a contact’s name, job title, email address, and a relevant URL. We recommend using the following layout:
| Name | Job Title | Email Address | URL |
Once saved, the contact will appear within the module, as well as next to the module when viewing the full curriculum in the ‘Browse’ screen.
Add Links, Notes, and Attachments
The depth of a student’s understanding is often developed by undertaking research outside of the curriculum. This provides them with better context for their learning and helps to broaden their subject knowledge. In Sofia, administrators can add links to useful online resources to modules, as well as attachments and private notes.
To begin, use an editor account and access the module you are adding to. From the module screen, you will see a ‘Links’ section and a ‘Notes’ section. To add a link, click ‘Add Link’, create a label for the link (this will be displayed on-screen), insert the URL, and click ‘Add’. The link will then appear to all users as part of the module.
In the ‘Notes’ section, you can privately attach documents to the module or write personal notes. Notes can be inserted as plain text or customised with a selection of word processing options, such as bold, italic, and underlined. Documents are attached using an upload facility.
As you will see from the video, in this example, only the links will be viewable by students. Any notes or documents attached will only be accessible or viewable via an editor account. However, if you would like to make the attachments accessible by students, this is also possible.
Take Control of Your Curriculum
What once would require days’ worth of planning and execution can now be achieved in minutes thanks to Sofia’s editing capabilities. Not only can curriculum changes be exacted in advance, but additions to the curriculum that enhance students’ learning can also be made simply and instantaneously.
If you would like your curriculum to be easy to edit and low maintenance, Sofia is the solution you’ve been looking for. To discuss implementing Sofia at your education setting, contact our team today.