What is Backwards Curriculum Design

Curriculum design is often applied to creating formal learning sequences to ensure that learners pursuing accredited coursework experience the proper learning contents, activities, life-building, and fair assessments in the proper order. In a lifelong learning context, learners will engage in a combination of formal (accredited), nonformal (byproduct learning from structured unaccredited learning contexts), and informal (unintentional) learning. For the latter two contexts, and for individual and groups of learners, there may be benefits in constructing a backwards curriculum design to enable target complex-skill capabilities (even those that require years of effort). This work explores how to create a backwards curriculum design from target complex-skill capabilities, using manually created data tables and related mind maps as early design tools. These enable advancing targeted learning by skill branches or by sequential approaches towards the target skillset.