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What are my Students Learning?

Curriculum  Design

Curriculum design is a process that ensures that students receive integrated, coherent learning experiences that contribute towards their personal, academic and professional learning and development.  Curriculum design is purposeful, deliberate, creative; it operates on many levels, it requires compromise; it has many stages and can fail!

For more information about the attributes visit: http://www.project2061.org/publications/designs/online/pdfs/designs/chapter1.pdf  

In designing curriculum we should focus on the outcomes of the course. Course learning outcomes state what we want our students to know, understand or be able to do as a result of successfully completing a particular course.

  • What should our students have learned and be able to do by the end of their degree?
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  • What kinds of teaching and learning activities will help the students develop that knowledge and those skills?
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  • What are the key concepts they will need to know?
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  • How will these best be assessed?
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  • What standard should we expect?

Graduate Attributes and CSU Degree Initiative

CSU has developed Graduate Attributes for Undergraduates which outlines the generic knowledge, understandings, skills values and attitudes that all graduates of Charles Sturt University will possess as a result of their academic experiences.  These Graduate Attributes are in addition to the more specific course related experiences that students also develop.  The Graduate Attributes are re-produced below.

CSU aims to produce graduates who are:

  1. Well-educated in the knowledge and skills of their discipline or profession;
  2. Effective communicators who have problem-solving, analytical and critical thinking skills and can work both independently and in teams;
  3. Work-ready and able to apply discipline expertise in professional practice;
  4. Able to develop and apply international perspectives in their discipline or profession;
  5. Able to engage meaningfully with the culture, experiences, histories and contemporary issues of Indigenous communities;
  6. Understanding of the responsibilities of global citizenship, value diversity and ethical practice;
  7. Understanding of financial, social and environmental sustainability; and
  8. Able to learn effectively in a range of environments including online.

As well as gaining an in-depth understanding of their chosen disciplines and professions, CSU has made a commitment to all undergraduates that they will have access to:  

  1. A supported transition to the first year of study; 
  2. Opportunities to develop skills in communication, problem-solving and analytical thinking; 
  3. Access to international experiences; 
  4. Opportunities to engage meaningfully with the culture, experiences, histories and contemporary issues of Indigenous communities; 
  5. Education based in practice; 
  6. Opportunities to gain a firm understanding of ethics; 
  7. Understandings of financial, social and environmental sustainability ; and
  8. Opportunities to develop online proficiency

This will be achieved through a process of ongoing course design. The CSU Degree Initiative (CSU-DI) aims to develop a design-based approach to degree level curriculum renewal to be introduced for all CSU undergraduate degrees from 2012.

External influences

The following external parties also influence course design at CSU.

The Australian Qualifications Framework

An essential consideration during course design is the The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). The AQF is the national policy for regulated qualifications in Australian education and training. It incorporates the qualifications from each education and training sector into a single comprehensive national qualifications framework. It sets the learning outcomes for each AQF level and qualification type.

Quality Assurance and External Agencies

CSU has participated (as a self accrediting institution) in the “fitness for purpose” audits conducted by Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA), with audits occurring in 2004 and 2009. From January 2012 the University will interact with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) to maintain its registration as a self accrediting higher education provider. This will involve assessment of compliance against Threshold Standards, the conduct of institutional and/or thematic quality assessments and the monitoring of activities that fall under the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act which have been to date the responsibility of states and territories. (http://www.csu.edu.au/division/plandev/students_only/quality_assurance/ )

Assessing levels of student learning

Creating learning outcomes will be required at a course and subject level.  Development of course and subject learning outcomes is undertaken by course and subject teams during the course review process and is generally not the responsibility of an individual. However, understanding how these objectives are developed can assist you with understanding how to assess student learning.

Blooms Taxonomy provides a way to classify learning objectives using verbs rather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy. They are arranged below in increasing order, from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).

Lower: Remembering; Understand; Applying. Higher: Analysing; Evaluating; Creating. 

Image Retrieved from: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy

Additional information about Blooms is available at:

http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html
http://www.schrockguide.net/bloomin-apps.html
http://at.ccconline.org/faculty/wiki/Teaching_Resources_-_Other_Resources_-_Blooms_Taxonomy

Another taxonomy that can be used to classify the quality of student work is Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO). SOLO starts with “only one or few aspects of the task (unistructural), then several unrelated aspects they are unrelated (multi structural), then we learn how to integrate them into a whole (relational), and finally, we are able to generalised that whole to as yet untaught applications (extended abstract).” (Biggs, SOLO Taxonomy http://www.johnbiggs.com.au/solo_taxonomy.html )

The SOLO Taxonomy helps to map levels of understanding that can be built into the intended learning outcomes and to create the assessment criteria or rubrics. Constructive alignment can be used for individual courses, for degree programmes, and at the institutional level, for aligning all teaching to graduate attributes.

Solo taxomony of understanding 

Image retrieved from: http://www.johnbiggs.com.au/solo_taxonomy.html