Adding a nursing program to the education program offered at a university or

college involves a significant process of designing an effective program for the

nursing program. Curriculum development is defined as, “a systematic planning of
what is learnt and taught in learning institutions as reflected in school programs and
on the study courses”. The primary objective or focus of any curriculum is on when
and what is to be learned or taught, leaving the decisions as to how curriculum
provisions should be carried out to the institutions’ teaching profession. Curriculum
development of a nursing program involves a long procedure of coming up with
curriculum, learning theories to be applied in the program, and undergoing vigorous
approval processes by the relevant bodies. Blueprint development of a curriculum
requires many processes such as designing models for delivering knowledge to
students, selecting learning objectives or goals, and creating assessment criteria and
methods for groups or individual processes. However, there exist many types of
external and internal factors, which will have a lot of impact on the curriculum design
of this nursing program.
Distinct types of internal factors will have many effects on the curriculum
development of this nursing program. Curriculum committees, is one of the most
salient internal factors, and will largely affect the design of the nursing curriculum.
This is because the committees will take a lot of time to approve the curriculum.
Curriculum committees comprise of academics and experts in the specific field who
have mandates to oversee the whole process of curriculum design. The curriculum
committees play pivotal roles in learning institutions and for high curriculum
standards to be maintained, the role of curriculum committees must be understood.
This is because vigorous scrutiny of the curriculum design is often carried out by the
relevant bodies which consumes a lot of time. This will thus delay the process of
curriculum design as a number of curriculum committees have to scrutinize the
program before it is fully approved. This process may take several months or even
years. In addition, the curriculum committees are mandated to review the curriculum
and make recommendations to the learning institution’s Governing Board on whether
to approve or reject the proposed curriculum. If the curriculum committees are not
satisfied by the curriculum design, then it hits a dead end.

Organizational processes are another internal factor that has many impacts on
the design of this curriculum. Organization processes can be conceived as, “the flow
of activities that must successfully link together for the curriculum development to be
successful”. This involves prioritizing, planning, and organizing the execution of the
curriculum program. Organization processes often dictate how a certain curriculum
should be developed or designed. This will affect the curriculum design, as some of
the organization processes will prove to be cumbersome.

In addition, internal review bodies is another  internal factor that also have a lot
of impact on curriculum development in that they take months or years just to review
proposed curriculum. These bodies have responsibilities of ensuring that all the
curriculum programs designed at the learning institutions meet the set standards and
requirements. Thus, they have to evaluate the whole process to confirm that it
corresponds to the set standards,

External factors also affect curriculum design largely. The learning institution’s
stakeholders affect curriculum design in that they compete to have many impacts on
the control or all learning programs introduced in the institutions. Over the years,
development of curriculum in the education sector has faced with many challenges
mostly from ideological camps that compete for control over the curriculum taught in
higher learning institutions. Thus, the proposed nursing curriculum will experience a
lot of influences and pressures from both internal and external stakeholders, all trying
to have a say on how the development of the curriculum should be done.

Another external factor that will affect curriculum development is the

regulatory and accrediting agencies. As there exists many agencies all aimed at
regulating health courses being offered at higher learning institutions, the curriculum
developer will be faced with many challenges when seeking accreditation from these
agencies. In addition, the accrediting agencies charge high fees for them to review and
accredit the program. This funds are no easily available thus negatively affecting the
accreditation process which is mandatory. In addition, regulatory and accrediting
agencies are in most cases very strict on the standards to be followed and are resistant
to any change proposed. Thus, the curriculum being developed has to follow these
standards which are sometimes primitive and not in line with the current trends.