When some human services agencies asked the University of Windsor School of Social Work to approve a Continuing Education (CE) Certificate for their professional staff, we needed to create a method for assessing the CE trainings which would be required to receive the certificate. Since a number of social work faculty would be reviewing CE trainings, based on faculty expertise, we were challenged to develop a standardized way to rate CE trainings. My colleague (Dr. Irene Carter) and I developed a CE curriculum rating tool, and following adjustment based on the agencies' suggestions, social work faculty used this tool to assess CE trainings.
We published this tool in Professional Development: The International Journal of Continuing Social Work Education, which is available at http://www.profdevjournal.org/articles/141015.pdf
We then thought that it would be helpful to expand this tool in order to evaluate higher education courses. We received funding from the University of Windsor Centre for Teaching and Learning Centred on Learning Innovation Fund to convene several focus groups consisting of faculty members from different disciplines, teaching & learning specialists, and graduate and undergraduate students. We asked participants to talk about the characteristics of course curriculum and teaching which successfully helped students learn. Our goal was to develop a tool which would help individual instructors assess their teaching rather creating a rating scale used to assess whether individual courses were well-constructed.
We presented a paper about this tool at the 2012 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Conference in Montreal, Quebec, and since the room was not big enough for all who were interested, the conference scheduled a second presentation time to accommodate the overflow. I have added a copy of this presentation and I have also added an updated copy of the Curriculum Evaluation Checklist which I hope will be useful for higher education instructors to use and adapt.
In addition, this checklist is also mentioned in a book chapter that we authored on evaluating course curricula. The reference is:
Coyle, J. P., Carter, I., Campbell, D., & Talor, O. (2014). Evaluating course curriculum and teaching: A checklist for higher education instructors. In S. Mukerji & P. Tripathi (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Transnational Higher Education Management (Vol. 1; pp. 330-349). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
I am also presenting this checklist for Social Work educators attending the June 2016 Joint World Conference on Social Work, Education and Social Development in Seoul, Korea.