What's Hiding in Your Curriculum?
We love the cooler weather, colorful leaves, and family gatherings (with tasty food) that come with this season. Continuous improvement for your curriculum doesn’t take a fall break. If your curriculum has been gathering cobwebs, it’s time to go on the hunt for mysterious gaps, wretched redundancies, and dark data that might be haunting your courses. Are you ready to uncover ways to enhance your curriculum using Coursetune?
Mysterious Gaps
When sitting around a campfire exchanging spooky stories with our fellow curriculum nerds, we often hear about the surprising things clients find in their curriculum once they have transformed it with Coursetune. Course elements that they thought were documented had vanished, assessments they knew existed couldn’t be located, or entire mappings to outcomes were lost in the dusty crypts full of forgotten curriculum binders. They didn’t know what was missing until they put all their data into Coursetune.
Wretched Redundancies
Coursetune looks stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with repeated learning objectives, you may have redundancies cluttering your course.
You reduce the number of repeated learning objectives by looking for the ones with the highest learning scale scaffolding. Here is a helpful guide to duplicate learning objectives. Duplication can happen beyond a single course when a program or grade level curriculum gets imported into Coursetune.
Seeing a collection of courses together in Coursetune gives faculty a novel opportunity to inquire how their course relates to all the others it sits among. How many times do students have large project-based assessments due? How often are students being assigned passive activities? These questions that were once unanswerable can be solved with Coursetune. What a treat that you can use the activity reports, universal search, and different views in Coursetune to seek out these redundancies at different levels.
Without a single curriculum database, you may never find redundancies. It’s impossible to search across multiple binders or read faculty members’ minds. To ensure students are being taught the skills they need, faculty must be clear on what they are teaching.
Dark Data
Shadow curriculum, course bloat, and course drift are all examples of curricular data going astray from the intended outcomes. These issues can confuse teachers and students leading to murkiness about what’s being taught and why. These occurrences are prevalent in curriculum that isn’t part of continuous improvement. The only documentation is a ten-year-old syllabus from a faculty member who no longer teaches there.
For most faculty, the first time they hear about these issues is from their students. If you’ve ever been asked, “Will this be on the test?” then you know your students are seeking clarity in the curriculum. By using Coursetune for alignment and mapping to outcomes, you can avoid dark data and support your students for better learning outcomes.
Bringing visibility to how courses relate to each other within a program or department can dispel that dark data. With Coursetune, you will have the clarity that comes with having all your data in one place and having the tools to investigate any dark data lurking within. For more on managing course bloat and course drift, watch this video from our help center.
