Assessing Learning Outcomes

How will you know that your students have met your objectives for the course?

The last course that I designed was BA301 for Portland State - Research and Analysis of Business Problems (for the record, I have no business background but was a reference librarian at a business school for a couple of years). For this course I was able to design one culminating assignment that let students demonstrate that they had met all of the course learning objectives.

This approach doesn't work for every situation. You might need to assign a final exam to test knowledge retention and a final project to assess analytic skills. You might be able to design your course without a culminating assessment if students can show their mastery as they go along.

However you decide to structure your assessment(s), you must give your students an opportunity to demonstrate that they have met all of your course objectives. Writing a good rubric for every assignment will help students understand the link between the assignment and the course objectives. If it's impossible to come up with an assessment that enables students to show that they've met an outcome, it probably needs to be revised.

Open Pedagogy

Are there any ways that students can demonstrate mastery while also contributing to the course itself or other real-world applications? Open pedagogy suggests that we rely less on “disposable assignments” that are only for the instructor to read, and take advantage of open licenses to enable students to revise, remix, and create their own content.

Open pedagogy has three components:

You make use of teaching and learning practices that are possible with OER and impossible with traditionally copyrighted materials
You use OER
Your students work in the open - they share their work with an open license.

Open pedagogy isn't a one-size strategy for every situation (just like any pedagogy!). There are a few considerations to make sure that the way you structure an open pedagogy assignment will work for your students:

Offer support in understanding open licenses and get clear consent to openly license student work. Sample materials are available in the folder Open Licenses for Students Links to an external site..
Consider student privacy concerns. It's a good idea to offer a public option and a private option (an alternative to the open assignment that's only read by you, or only read by you + classmates).
Find an audience for the student work that is both a real-world setting and that has an authentic need for student contributions. One of the most obvious contexts for student work is future versions of your course, though you might also consider Wikipedia, letters to the editor, research publications, etc.

More on this: What is Open Pedagogy? Links to an external site. by David Wiley.