Flexible and modular curricula are a recurring theme in higher-education reform, especially in programs built to span several countries and institutions. This page looks at the general concepts behind that theme, as reported in project materials published by the now-closed VitaGLOBAL project, an EU-funded higher-education partnership distinct from this independent site.
VitaGLOBAL ran between 2018 and 2023 as an Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education (CBHE) partnership, coordinated by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Tarragona together with OBREAL, a global higher-education observatory, and around seventeen partner institutions across Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, South Africa and Georgia. Its stated aim was building joint master's-level programmes in viticulture, oenology and vitiviniculture across that partner network. Project materials, including documents on curriculum design, were published through vitaglobal.obreal.org, which remains the original source for anything specific the project itself claimed or produced; this site did not produce that material and does not speak for the project.
What "modular and flexible curricula" generally means
In higher-education literature, a modular curriculum breaks a degree programme into discrete, often independently assessed units ("modules") that can be combined, sequenced or substituted with more flexibility than a fixed, linear course plan. The underlying goals, widely discussed since the Bologna Process reforms across European higher education, usually include making credits transferable between institutions, letting students build a programme that mixes contributions from multiple partner universities, and making it easier to update individual modules without redesigning an entire degree each time content needs revision.
For a multi-country partnership like VitaGLOBAL, this approach has a practical logic: if a joint master's programme draws on expertise spread across partner universities in different countries, a modular structure makes it feasible for a student to take, say, a viticulture module at one institution and a wine-marketing module at another, with credits recognized consistently across the partnership, rather than requiring every partner to teach an identical full curriculum independently.
Internationalization of higher education
"Internationalization" in this context refers to a broader set of practices beyond student exchange: joint curriculum design across countries, staff mobility for teaching and training, shared quality-assurance standards, and partnerships that deliberately link regions with historically limited academic cooperation. Erasmus+ CBHE projects, as a funding category, exist specifically to support this kind of structured cooperation between European universities and partner-country institutions, with built-in expectations around capacity building (training local staff, developing shared materials) rather than one-off exchange.
Checklist: reading project materials on curriculum design
- Go to the original publishing source, vitaglobal.obreal.org, for any specific document, finding or module description attributed to the project, rather than relying on a secondary summary.
- Check the publication date on any document; a project that closed in 2023 will not reflect curriculum changes made afterward at partner institutions.
- Distinguish general higher-education concepts (modularity, credit transfer, internationalization) from specific claims the project made about its own programmes, since the former are broadly documented in the literature while the latter need direct verification against the project's own materials.
- Note that OBREAL, as a global higher-education observatory, is a separate organization from the universities in the partnership; its role was coordination and publication support rather than academic delivery.
Comparing curriculum structures
| Structure | Flexibility | Typical use case |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed, linear curriculum | Low; set sequence of courses | Single-institution degree with stable content |
| Modular curriculum | Higher; modules can be combined or substituted | Multi-institution or multidisciplinary programmes |
| Modular + cross-institutional credit recognition | Highest; modules taken across partner universities | Joint international master's programmes, such as the model VitaGLOBAL worked toward |
For the project's workpackage structure and how curriculum design fit into the broader partnership, see workpackages. For the viticulture and oenology subjects this site covers independently, see the modules overview and the general resources page.