Learning Outcomes: The Driving Force

Learning outcomes have received much attention in the last decade or so. The public wants to be assured that the courses students pay hard earned money for help them achieve something valuable and ultimately help them obtain a good job. Legislatures have pushed accreditation agencies to demand assessment of outcomes at universities they accredit. UTEP must submit its 5 yr interim report ot its accrediting agency in 2011 and show evidence that all academic programs assess the effectiveness of their curricula in helping student achieve the stated Program Learning Outcomes (PLO).

In the context of this “bigger picture” you can see the roles of individual classes more clearly. If accreditation agencies (the Southern Association for Colleges and Schools: SACS is the agency that accredits UTEP) are demanding accountability of academic programs, the programs must hold faculty and instructional staff accountable for what they do in the classroom. In this context, every single faculty member must ensure that the content, learning activities, and assessments in his/her class are directly contributing to the program’s learning outcomes. No longer can departments and programs allow individual instructors to determine what they will teach in their courses. Each course has to help students achieve the PLOs and must be continually assessed on its effectiveness in doing so. On an annual basis, the faculty must review the data gathered on student performance to determine where improvements are needed in the curriculum to better meet their PLOs. We are now required to show evidence that we are really doing what we say we do. The “trust us, we’re doing our job” argument is no longer accepted.

In this context, faculty must think carefully about what it is that students should be able to do at the end of their course. To determine what those outcomes are, faculty members should understand the PLOs, and the place of their course in the curriculum. Ideally, the faculty in a department should collectively discuss the learning outcomes for each class, ensure these are aligned with the PLOs, and decide which PLOs are covered in which class. Each individual faculty member then has the opportunity to decide how to best help students achieve these outcomes in his/her class.

Determining what the learning outcomes should be for GRAD 6100 was a bit different from the process described above. I relied on conversations with faculty developers at other universities, books by the lead thinkers in teaching and learning, consults with the graduate school, a survey the graduate students in Spring 2009, and my own experiences, to determine what the needs were and what the students should gain from this class to prepare them well for a teaching position in higher education. This seminar cannot cover all the aspects of teaching and learning, we have academic programs that try to do that, nor be everything to everybody. It can only offer general teaching and learning principles that the participants must translate into the specific teaching actions befitting the culture of their disciplines and the constraints placed upon their course through its situational factors (see Fink, 2003).