From Curriculum Alignment to Curriculum Agility: A Model for AI-Responsive Higher Education
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Abstract
Higher-education curricula must remain internally aligned while responding to rapid changes in generative artificial intelligence, professional practice, and student learning. This article develops an AI-Responsive Curriculum Agility (AIRCA) model through an integrative conceptual review of 32 DOI-verified publications. The synthesis combines constructive alignment, curriculum agility, AI literacy, assessment, faculty capability, governance, and equity. It identifies a recurrent institutional problem: universities often respond to AI through tool guidance or isolated course innovations while programme outcomes, assessment constructs, and quality-assurance processes remain unchanged. The proposed model addresses that problem through six linked stages: environmental scanning, curriculum diagnosis, competency renewal, course and assessment redesign, ethics-equity-stakeholder review, and monitoring through controlled iteration. Assessment redesign functions as the validity anchor of the cycle, while governance distinguishes rapid course-level adjustment from changes to programme standards. The model also separates AI-augmentable performance from capabilities graduates must independently own, including disciplinary judgement, verification, ethical reasoning, and accountable decision-making. Ten design principles and an implementation matrix translate the model into programme and course decisions. The article contributes by extending constructive alignment with a temporal and organisational capacity for evidence-informed change. For Indonesian and other resource-diverse higher-education systems, it proposes contextual rather than uniform agility, with explicit attention to connectivity, language, disability, privacy, staff workload, and unequal access. Curriculum agility is therefore defined not as constant revision, but as the disciplined capacity to make timely, coherent, equitable, and educationally defensible change.
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References
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