Engineering the Structure of Decision-making Powerin Higher Education Curriculum Design

The field of curriculum is one of the most challenging and controversial fields of enquiry. The question of who should make curriculum decisions has been a central issue throughout the history of curriculum development. The first aim of the present article is to get acquainted with the decision-making structure in higher education curriculum design and also to find out whether it is better to centralize or decentralize by searching and reviewing articles from the most famous databases such as irandoc, cilivica, Jahad Daneshgahi database (SID), magiran, noormagz, Google, etc. The author introduces centralized and decentralized systems and examines their advantages and disadvantages in higher education planning and in the history of higher education in Iran and its developments in different periods, levels of decentralization of the curriculum, the position of participation of faculty members and important factors as well as barriers to their participation in the program development process. Finally, while expressing the challenges and solutions of decentralized planning, it has been concluded that complete transfer of decision-making power will not be a good solution to meet the existing needs, but a combination of decentralized and semi-centralized status for higher education in Iran can be very useful and effective.