In the seminar of designing course and assessment, everyone shared one of the examples of the planned unit design or assessment brief. In the break-out group discussions, I showed the online unit design to the postgraduate students. I talked about the how I reviewed my own unit learning outcomes comparing with the toolkit of crafting learning outcomes from the Moodle. Previously, I did not clearly consider about mapping aims and learning outcomes across the unit based on the six steps and different levels of the programme.
In the break-out group discussions, the team members gave me some feedbacks and they showed a very clear roadmap in the unit handbook, from aims to learning outcomes, and displaying the five criteria in enquiry, knowledge, process, communication, and realisation relevant to its learning outcomes. I feel it is very clear and can be applied to my unit planning showing on the Assessment Brief and Scheme of Work:
Roadmap for the aims, learning outcomes, and assessment criteria
The unit aims, learning outcomes, and assessment could be created based on intrinsic motivation or external values. A culture of metrics and rankings is created to answer the question about what we are fostering or enabling for the students.
In the theory, it argued some fields of study in creative arts, imagination cannot be sufficient measurable. Besides for the arts subject, for my unit, economics, and finance, I also think the learning outcomes should be carefully measured by the different formats of assessments. It can be argued that science subjects’ assessments also should consider carefully about its lack of testing students’ creativity and explorations in the study. It can be clearly seen that the learning outcome with ‘successfully applying knowledge into practical’ cannot purely examined by one method of assessment, for example, calculations or multiple choices. To review the learning outcomes with the assessment method, it should contain more than one format of assessments for the unit. How to develop and apply the knowledge beyond the lecture contents are difficult to test.
It is back to the original idea in the class, purpose, and perception of purpose, all is the loop. Once we write down the learning outcomes and assessment brief, it is helpful to review them again based on the intrinsic motivation or external values. It could be helpful to engage teaching team members to review the learning outcomes and assessment methods, rethink about whether it meets the internal and industrial requirements, also with a sufficient unbiased test method.