Content analysis of the Faculty of Technology's curriculum - addressing the dimensions of multidisciplinarity, industry collaboration and sustainability

The improvement and actualisation of university curriculums, within engineering education, is critical in preparing future talents who, in turn, will address national and global challenges. Qualified researchers and teachers are constantly updating their knowledge and skills to impart state of the art information to students. The description of courses, as included in a curriculum, presents students' first contact point with a particular discipline. Furthermore, information delivered through the course descriptions presents a summarised version of the knowledge offered by that faculty to its community. Therefore, a well formulated description of each course is the first important step towards clear communication amongst experts in the discipline, students and other faculty members. This paper describes a curriculum content analysis of eight master of science programmes: five within the domain of Information and Communication Technology, three within Computer Science and one minor programme, all of them offered by the Department of Computing, which it is within the Faculty of Technology, University of Turku, Finland. The total number of courses enclosed in the study is 123. During the content analysis, researchers addressed: multidisciplinarity, industry collaboration and sustainability in the curriculum. These three aspects represent key strategies embraced by the University of Turku. The researchers employed content and discourse analysis to study written and spoken language in relation to its context. The findings of this study offer a holistic view as to the diversity of disciplinary knowledge offered by the programmes. Additionally, the results highlight the fact that information communicated by the written curriculum course descriptions needed to improve as some descriptions were confusing and/or ambivalent. Furthermore, only a very few courses explicitly offer keywords which link the content matter to the University of Turku's strategies, as addressed in the study. Based on the findings, this paper offers suggestions on how to better support curriculum work and consequently connect to core university strategies through improving the quality of course descriptions.