Cohort July 2022: Faculty of Forestry – Andres Varhola, Bosung Kim, Selina Park, Ishampreet Kaur, Natalie Hui, Kylie Meredith
Project background
While professors work hard to formulate clear and specific learning outcomes in their courses, assignments and tests are typically not set up for teachers and learners to adequately monitor the fulfilment of each outcome —a concept known as “mastery.” This may result in students passing courses with critical knowledge gaps on specific topics, with instructors unaware of the issue. However, the Canvas tool known as Outcomes is still very underutilized at UBC, despite its ability to track course mastery at the student or class level. It essentially allows the linkage of instructor-defined learning outcomes (LOs) with specific assignment questions and rubrics, resulting in a Learning Mastery Gradebook that evaluates mastery of specific contents both individually and collectively. While this is the ultimate pedagogical tool for educators and learners to identify topics conveyed ineffectively, tracking mastery at the outcome level could not be easily done earlier without the computational power of learning management systems like Canvas. Moreover, implementing Outcomes is a massive task that could highly benefit from teamwork involving instructors and students.
Project details
The purpose of this project is to perform a critical review of existing LOs and fully activate Outcomes in Canvas for the FRST 304: “The Science of Forests & Conservation” course, thus helping future enrolled students identify their learning gaps and focus on those topics not yet mastered while supporting instructors to design methods for the improvement of underperforming LOs.
The project involves a partnership approach with substantial input from student partners who have taken the course in the past, with five major phases:
- Critical evaluation of existing
- Indexing of enhanced LOs and question banks in Canvas Outcomes tool
- Evaluation of gaps after one term of course enrollment
- Re-evaluation of LOs and questions
- Dissemination to encourage other professors to incorporate the tracking of course content mastery
This course redesign — centered on the fine-tuning, digitalization and linkage of LOs with assignments and tests — will have a strong impact on the quality of FRST 304 in the following ways:
- The detailed revision of LOs by former student partners will provide invaluable improvements to their formulation
- Enrolled students will be able to track their mastery of individual LOs and concentrate study efforts where most needed
- Teachers will be able to monitor topic mastery in detail at the class level, enhancing instruction for specific content
- All LOs will be properly represented by coursework questions, and eliminate questions not directly related to a specific LO
Impacts of this project outside of the FRST 304 classroom include:
- Significant professional development of student partners involved in the project, particularly related to pedagogical understandings, which will enhance their own future learning.
- The faculty partner will be able to significantly improve his teaching methods and maximize the utilization of Outcomes in other courses.
- The dissemination of the project will encourage other instructors at UBC and beyond to implement this powerful tool, possibly with similar projects involving student partners.