Accreditation of degrees requires a professional accrediting body to identify the knowledge that they expect graduates to hold.
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Courses then have to “chunk” this content into units of study in ways that make sense to them in order to deliver it to their students.
Organisations have to persuade the accrediting body that any student who graduates is guaranteed to possess the required knowledge.
In recent years, this has been achieved by attaching learning outcomes to each unit of study. Learning outcomes identify the learning that students have to demonstrate they possess in order to pass the unit.
Week by week, maps (lesson plans) are created identifying when and how the required content is delivered (so that material for each week is linked to the relevant learning outcome). Assessments are designed and marked against the learning outcomes.
This constructive alignment is thought to not only enable the organisation to have its course accredited, but to help students plan their studies: students know what to expect and there are no surprises as they are offered content that they know will be in the assessments. It is thought to be a more student-centred approach to teaching and learning.
It all sounds quite reasonable, but recent research is beginning to question this approach.
The suggestion is that such a tight specification of what can be taught stifles students’ imagination.
The suggestion is that such a tight specification of what can be taught stifles students’ imagination. The teaching and learning process becomes more mechanical and students’ attention is focused more on the assignments and we hear students asking: “is this in the exam/assignment” because if it’s not we know from experience students will not engage with the material.
Accompanying this focus on learning outcomes, and the consequent micro-managing of the student learning experience, is our national focus on “measuring” our educational standards through testing.
It is rare to not require at least one form of assessment to be a test or an exam. Students often find tests/exams particularly stressful and there are many who may perform well in other forms of assessment but crash and burn when it comes to exams.
Again, we have to ask ourselves, is this neoliberal micromanagement of teaching and learning benefitting our students? Australia’s declining NAPLAN and PISA results suggest that it is not and that perhaps it is time for a new way to think about our teaching and learning.
Nelson, earlier this year, suggested we go back to the old idea of developing teaching objectives rather than using learning outcomes.
Teaching objectives focus on the learning opportunities we want to provide for our students rather than on what we want students to learn.
Teaching objectives, he claims, offer students more flexibility, as they can engage with the learning opportunities we provide in different ways.
Accrediting bodies will not be happy with teaching objectives because they do not prescribe the standardised knowledge that they may want graduates of a course to possess.
However, in a world where life-long learning is now the norm, it may be that graduates primed with curiosity, with experiences in following their curiosity to learn new things, may well be in a better position to function in the kinds of future jobs that we have not yet dreamed about.
Neoliberalism is all about control: control of what is learned and control of how that learning is then enacted in the workplace.
One day we will live in a post-neoliberal world: students graduating with the ability to think for themselves, and the capacity to make decisions on the basis of critical and rational thinking rather than following the expectations of others, may well be in a better position to participate in, and contribute, to that world.
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