Alignment
Your course outcomes must be aligned with your program outcomes, and your course activities and assessment tools must be aligned with your outcomes. This is not to say that every activity and assignment will get to every outcome, but it is important to keep in mind (and communicate clearly with students) why we choose the learning opportunities we do, and why we test what we do. Some of the following questions may be useful to consider in course-program alignment:
Which courses address which of the program level outcomes? At what point in the program or sequence should the student have attained this program-level outcome?
Are there courses or sequences that allow a student to develop from beginning level competence to higher-level skills in a given outcome?
Outcomes Mapping
A simple way of demonstrating alignment is with an outcomes map, or curriculum map. This can also happen at many levels. Some popular examples of mapping include:
programs to ILOs
courses to program outcomes
courses/sequences to ILOs
These maps show the point at which each outcome is addressed. A simple map could look something like this:
One popular rule of thumb for program curriculum mapping is to consider a program outcome addressed by a course when the learning opportunities and evidence (assignments, tests, etc.) designed to address that outcome constitute at least 5% of the final grade for that course.
Another important consideration is that the program-level outcomes map is somewhat simplistic in structure; it does not show the exact way in which course outcomes map to program outcomes, but rather simply that different core courses contribute to program outcomes attainment in different places. Course-level curriculum maps (see next page) are therefore a useful tool to help express the more specific ways in which an individual core course contributes to overall program learning, as well as capture the various learning opportunities and assessment tools, or artifacts, used to develop and demonstrate outcomes attainment at the course level.
For more detailed guidance on effective curriculum, as well as some examples of curriculum maps, see below:
