In today’s post, we’re introducing a suite of self-serve materials that you can draw on—at McGill or at another institution—if you wish to develop program learning outcomes or map the curriculum in your unit (e.g., school, department, faculty). First, we’ll tackle the jargon, defining program learning outcomes and curriculum mapping. Second, we’ll give an overview of the self-serve materials we’ve developed. Third, we’ll explain why we created these self-serve materials. Fourth, we’ll share some next steps you can consider.
1. Tackling the jargon: Program learning outcomes and curriculum mapping
Program learning outcomes (“program outcomes” for short) are clear statements of the knowledge, skills, and values (or attitudes) that a unit wishes for their students to develop by the end of a given program. Much as course learning outcomes help to guide instructional decisions at the course level, program learning outcomes help to guide curricular decisions at the program level.
Curriculum mapping involves collecting, visualizing (via curriculum maps), discussing, and interpreting information about the courses in which students work toward achieving specific program outcomes. It also involves determining to what extent those program outcomes are addressed.
2. Self-serve materials: Overview
The Develop the curriculum article, published in our unit’s Teaching and Learning Knowledge Base, offers guidance to units that are considering developing program outcomes and/or mapping the curriculum. It describes the purpose of each process and offers a suite of online materials. These materials can be adapted to different institutional contexts by instructors, administrators, educational developers, or instructional designers who are keen to foster conversations with colleagues about what you want students to get out of your program.
- Read about how to create program outcomes, including why program outcomes matter, a process for drafting them, the characteristics of useful program outcomes, and possible next steps. Self-serve materials (a guide including survey questions and a retreat agenda, plus slides) can be downloaded to support you in creating program outcomes.
- Read about how to map the curriculum, including why curriculum mapping matters, a mapping process, and possible next steps. Self-serve materials (a guide including survey questions, discussion questions, and a retreat agenda, plus a curriculum mapping template and slides) can be downloaded to support you in mapping the curriculum.
3. Self-serve materials: Inspiration and rationale
We were inspired to create self-serve materials by a self-guided Sustainability 101 module that the McGill Office of Sustainability (MOOS) created as part of the Sustainable Workplace Certification process in 2021. Rather than a colleague from MOOS presenting this content in many units, an annotated slide deck was shared with all units working towards certification, and a given unit worked through the slides as a group.
This struck us as a great idea! We facilitate retreats and discussions on these topics (capacity permitting), and by creating self-serve materials, we can offer interested units another type of support. The “self-serve” concept gives more autonomy to units wishing to locally develop program outcomes or map their curriculum, while concurrently increasing our team’s capacity to support units.
4. Possible next steps
If you are a McGill colleague interested in developing program outcomes or doing curriculum mapping, check out the self-serve materials! If you wish, you can also request a consultation to discuss your unit’s needs and how these materials might be adapted locally.
If you are a colleague at another institution, we invite you to check out the self-serve materials and consider whether the materials or the concept of self-serve materials more broadly could support your work (keeping in mind your local processes and requirements).
Header photo credit: Andreea Avramescu via unsplash.com
