Curriculum design requirements and challenges of the learning society approach

Facing the twenty-first century with the development of communities, people are faced with the necessity of moving towards a learning society. University must extend the learning opportunities and improve their quality with curriculum design through applying learning society approach to be able to respond to that necessity. Researchers believe that some conditions are needed for the above curriculum to succeed. The present article attempts to answer the following question: "Which requirements and challenges does a university face with to design a curriculum with learning society approach?" In order to answer the above question a qualitative-quantitative research was carried out wherein the viewpoints of 24 higher education experts were collected through interview; in the same way the comments of 153 faculty members were taken by administering a questionnaire, the results of both were finally evaluated. The content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by experts and the reliability was estimated via Cronbach's alpha (0.96). The results indicated that the university faces with following challenges: The non-substitution of learning instead of education; Incomplete identification of real needs of the students and society and non-revision the curriculum to suit the changing needs; Poor communication between levels of higher education curriculum and the previous degrees; Centralization in curriculum planning; Lack of flexibility in curriculum; Inadequate use of curriculum experts and disregarding role of faculty and student to develop the curricula. Statistical analysis of the survey findings also proved that there is no significant difference among the viewpoints of faculty members about these challenges, in terms of gender, education, academic ranking, type of university and experience in teaching and management.