In the last post I stated that no course is an island. Every course is part of a bigger picture, part of a deliberate series of related content and outcomes that form a vision for what a graduate needs to enter the workforce and progress society. There are many aspects of program design that need addressing, but I am conscious that there is a significant amount of information and discussion about many aspects that need not repeating. Designing Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs), for example, has had extensive treatment elsewhere. In this post I will focus on the first of two aspects of mapping courses to PLOs: PLO coverage, and course alignment to PLOs.
Are all PLOs created equally?
Once the PLOs have been designed for a program, the first thing to negotiate is whether each PLO requires the same amount of attention throughout the program. Of course, each PLO is as important as the other, but this doesn’t mean that they require the same amount of content and coverage for them to be achieved. The illustration below highlights a disproportionate coverage of the number of courses aligned to each PLO. This scenario may be perfectly acceptable, but it may also not be. That is why deconstructing each PLO to reveal the domain of skills they cover is a useful activity for a program team. This will reveal how expansive the teaching will need to be for a learner to satisfy the outcome.
A more defined and granular approach would be to consider how much teaching time is to be afforded to each PLO, as a percentage of the total time a student would spend in the program. If a learner undertakes 24 courses in a program, and each course is approximately 150 hours of learning time, how much time is dedicated to each PLO can be understood.
In the next post I discuss the second key consideration of mapping courses in program design.
I’m Paul Moss. I’m a learning designer at the University of Adelaide. Follow me on Twitter @edmerger
LEARNING DESIGN by Paul G Moss 