A Significant Curriculum Design in Advanced Technological and Vocational Education

Due to the rapid change in the world technology and the growth of national economy, the traditional curriculum design in vocational education system is difficult to meet the industrial demands. Cluster curriculum, originally proposed to enhance graduate student's employment capabilities by researchers and promoted by the Ministry of Education, integrates limited educational resources and provides students with more flexible study environments without unnecessary restrictions across the departments. As part of our previous reports in this topic, this research evaluating students' future income by an economic model and conducting a significance analysis by a questionnaire survey, is aimed to implement the cluster curriculum design in vocational and technological universities. It is found that the cluster curriculum design with separating major/minor courses is superior to the current one, disperse curriculum with all courses pooling together. Examining a case study at Shu-Te University of Science and Technology in Taiwan and using descriptive statistics and correlations, we describe the characteristics of the cluster curriculum as well as suggest the three factors contributing to the major dimensions of the curriculum design for further analysis.