New Curriculum Development For A Top African University

A new curriculum is being developed for undergraduate education in a Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering for one of the top universities in Africa. The old curriculum is many years old and needs to be re-vamped. I was invited to be a member of a committee selected to help provide input and advice for the university. The committee has re-vamped the curriculum and made drastic changes to it to meet current needs. In this paper, we provide information about the old and new curriculum. We also specify the new themes we identified for inclusion in the new curriculum development process. This is a great example of curriculum development issues that need to be tackled for most universities in developing countries. Later, we discuss the needs required to implement the new curriculum. Part of the issues are based on the fact that these universities have to do with less in terms of having the financial support and the means required to provide state-of-art equipment for teaching and research in Electronic and Electrical Engineering. We focus on the need to develop a sizable amount of endowment to help the university offset some of the costs of procuring and maintaining equipment for teaching and research. We discuss other challenges such as recruiting new faculty and finding expertise to teach some of the new courses in the curriculum and suggest some possible solutions.