The Digital Curriculum Database: Meeting the Needs of Industry and the Challenge of Enhanced Student Learning

Prepared and presented by:

Elaine Soetaert and Sandi Barber

Authors: Members of Technology and Curriculum Innovation, including Jeff Zabudsky, Charles Coe, Jennifer Semchuk, Elaine Soetaert, and Sandi Barber

Description

This paper describes an institute-wide project called "LOGging Our Curriculum" being undertaken at The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The project’s goals involve creating digital outcomes-based curriculum and housing it in a database that is accessible to NAIT instructors over the World Wide Web. Using a NAIT-developed application called MERLIN, the instructors enter curriculum, create courses, and ultimately deliver the curriculum using WebCT.

Presentation

Introduction

Technical institutions, in community with all post-secondary institutions, face unique challenges as they strive to fulfill their traditional roles in an increasingly global economy that is being transformed by technological innovation. Technical institutes have always been expected to provide job-ready graduates to industry by ensuring graduate proficiency in a list of entry-level competencies. However, three critical factors in today’s economy are rendering traditional practices obsolete. The first critical factor is the pace of change confronted by today’s technical institute. Technological innovation in industry is taxing the technical institute’s capacity to respond with relevant curriculum. The process of curriculum development and redesign is often left to individual instructors who admirably endeavor to teach, maintain currency in their disciplinary fields, and redevelop curriculum. This process taxes individuals and requires more time and effort than is often available.

The second critical factor that is forcing change in traditional practice relates to the learning needs of today’s student. Whereas the industry specific skills-development approach to teaching and learning has served institutes well and will continue to form a large part of institutional culture, students today need to prepare for an economy that will demand their continuing development. The reality is that no institution can expect to fully prepare students for today’s workplace. For this reason, technical institutes need to not only teach the skills of a trade but also ensure students have developed skills necessary for lifelong learning. The university sector in Canada has recognized this added value feature of a university education and has done a good job of marketing broad liberal arts education as a strong foundation to life-long learning. In order for technical institutes to remain relevant to industry and competitive with other educational institutions, a systematic response to updating teaching and learning processes is warranted. In many ways, these changes will strike at the heart of the very culture of education both technical and otherwise.

The third critical factor that is forcing change is the demand of the students themselves for an alternate approach to the traditional delivery method. Students are no longer prepared to meet the institution’s Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 schedule. Along with the demand for life-long learning comes the demand for institutions to meet the student’s schedule and needs. Many institutions are rushing to meet this demand, but on an institute-wide basis, the approach is generally inconsistent at best and chaotic at worst. This paper describes the response of The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology to the above challenges.

The Digital Curriculum Database and The Challenge of Industry-Relevant Learning at NAIT

The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, yearly serves 7,500 full-time program students, 7,000 apprenticeship students, and 40,000 continuing education students. In total, more than 50,000 learners come in contact with NAIT each year. NAIT is one of Canada’s largest technical institutes and is Canada’s largest apprenticeship training institution.

To date, NAIT has a solid track record of responding quickly and comprehensively to industry needs by maintaining close contact with accreditation bodies through the establishment of a rich industry advisory network, and by means of a competency profile development (CPD) process (similar to a DACUM) that is built on validation by industry. The competency profile development system has served NAIT well over the years and, as a testament to its quality, has been sold to other technical institutions around the world. However, while the competency development and validation processes are demonstrably successful, the process of introducing those competencies into the curriculum has become increasingly challenging because of the lag time between change in industry and change in curriculum. A systematic and routine process for ensuring both the regularity of the CPD process and the transfer of CPD recommendations into the curriculum design process is just now being addressed.

The LOGging Our Curriculum Project

The need to normalize the process of curriculum renewal in the face of variable industry dynamics has led to establishing an institutional curriculum database. The digital curriculum database is the technological underpinnings of an initiative to transform all NAIT curricula into outcomes-based modules. The project is called LOGging Our Curriculum, and the first step has involved the identification of learning outcomes for all courses at NAIT. The outcome statements have been fashioned into a format that incorporates an accepted list of verbs, classified according to Bloom’s taxonomy. The marriage of this classification scheme to database technology provides instructors with technical tools to better identify the levels and domains of knowledge contained within their curriculum. A subsequent section will describe how the database of learning outcomes is tied to a more comprehensive curriculum development methodology. However, it is worthwhile here to consider the institutional implications of an accurate, real-time record of all NAIT learning outcomes and, consequently, a shared curriculum resource.

Industry-Relevant Curriculum

As noted above, a continuing challenge for NAIT instructors has been the incorporating of regular competency profile development recommendations into their curriculum. This is no small task for instructors given that they carry full teaching loads and are dedicated teachers who commit to spending additional time assisting students in many ways throughout the course of a year. The LOGging Our Curriculum initiative offers an opportunity to update the CPD process in order to normalize the function of curriculum validation and renewal in the context of an instructor’s regular work. A soon-to-be-released, NAIT-developed, Web-based instrument, VALIDATOR, that is easily operated by instructors is realizing this validation process. The process will allow programs to generate a survey drawn from the curriculum database that will be distributed to industry. The results of that survey will then drive further curriculum development. Because the curriculum is entirely built upon individual outcomes, the consequent granularity will allow instructors to reconstruct courses without complete course overhauls.

Sharing Curriculum

The curriculum database will provide instructors the opportunity to share curriculum across the Institution. It is well known that all programs teach to many of the same learning outcomes. For example, learning outcomes associated with basic computer skills, team building, conflict management, and Ohm’s Law are just a few of the learning outcomes that are critical to student success in many programs at NAIT. However, curricula to support these outcomes have traditionally been developed in isolation, program by program. As a shared resource available to all, the curriculum database will allow instructors to both submit their ideas and also draw on the curriculum development expertise of their colleagues across the institution. The curriculum model that has been developed is sufficiently flexible for instructors to draw on a consistent curriculum framework while at the same time bring to bear their own personal teaching artistry.

An Interdisciplinary Resource

Another benefit of the shared database is its interdisciplinary nature. While technological innovation marches towards greater industrial technology convergence, technical institutions should naturally look to greater interdisciplinary activity. For example, the cabinet making industry has been revolutionized by the introduction of information technologies into its practices. Tertiary institutions must break down disciplinary walls and ensure that the reality of this convergence in industry is reflected in the form and content of student curriculum.

Avoiding Duplication

The curriculum database will allow overlapping effort to be kept to an absolute minimum. With an instructional staff that numbers 800 daytime instructors (not to mention the number of continuing education instructors), it is clear that instructors cannot possibly be aware of all curriculum development across the institution. However, with the curriculum database, instructors can efficiently examine existing curriculum and make informed decisions about further course development. This sharing of knowledge will help NAIT avoid duplication of curricula and, at the same time, magnify existing intellectual capital. For example, knowing that a high quality module on Ohm’s Law already exists frees an instructor to focus valuable curriculum development time either on preparing new modules to meet the emerging demands of industry or on refining modules in areas that pose particular challenges for students.

Finally, the curriculum database will provide an invaluable resource for NAIT’s business development unit’s customized training. An increasingly large portion of NAIT’s revenue comes from continuing education services to industry clients who demand a more customized and focused approach to training. NAIT’s outcomes-based format is ideally suited to designing a curriculum that can be quickly and effectively delivered to meet the just in time demands of many industry clients.

The Digital Curriculum Database: The Challenge of Changing Learner Needs and Expectations at NAIT

Systematic Instructional Design

The curriculum database is not simply a means to ensure a valid series of learning outcomes is assembled to meet the demands of industry. While the needs of industry are important to all decisions that are made in regards to curriculum at NAIT, students remain NAIT’s primary customers, and it is the needs of students that provide the momentum behind LOGging Our Curriculum. Because students remain at the forefront of academic decision-making, NAIT is committed to a pedagogically sound curriculum design and delivery model. The LOGging Our Curriculum project prescribes an institute-wide approach to instructional design that has proven successful and particularly apt in a technical institute setting. Kolb’s experiential learning model forms the foundation for NAIT’s institutional standard and befits an organization with an activity-oriented approach to learning. The incorporation of the experiential learning model into the database design ensures that NAIT’s curriculum includes hands-on, practical components.

Because the experiential learning model is based on Kolb’s research, it also addresses the issues of learning styles. Curriculum developed in alignment with the model ensures that students who perceive and process information differently are engaged in activities that meet their preferred style.

Enabling and Ensuring Instructional Design

When an institution embarks on a project as broad as the "LOGging Our Curriculum" project and requires faculty to adhere to a particular instructional design model, it is reasonable that the institution would provide a methodology for aiding instructors in the task. Considering that many instructional faculty are subject matter experts first and not necessarily skilled curriculum developers, NAIT developed a web-based application called MERLIN to aid faculty as they create Learning Outcome Guides (LOGs) for their students. MERLIN guides instructors in their development of outcome and objective statements and provides a structure for the entry data into fields that are designed to meet instructional design protocols. Working from existing materials – lesson plans, calendars, curriculum maps – instructors can build a learning outcome guide in a short focused period of time. All data is subsequently stored in the "LOGging Our Curriculum" digital database.

Empowering Learners

Preparing students for success in the workplace must go beyond ensuring they have mastered industry-specific skill-sets. Graduates into today’s workplace need to be flexible, critically analytical thinkers in order to master ongoing changes in today’s world. We know that today’s graduates will work in multiple careers and settings throughout their lives, and NAIT is eager to provide these students with the skills necessary to succeed in such environments -- skills such as self-inquiry and learning autonomy. LOGging Our Curriculum puts well-developed Learning Outcome Guides (LOGs) into the hands of students. These empowering tools will each provide a clearly articulated learning outcome, a rationale, pre and post tests, enabling objectives, and a description of learning activities that students can engage in to meet each objective.

In some ways, the LOG will serve as a contract between industry, instructors, and students. Recall that the Learning Outcome Guides are directly drawn from the industry- validated database so the LOG will reflect the learning outcomes that are identified in the database. Students will receive the LOGs at the outset of each course, and instructors will use the LOGs as guides throughout the term. The expectations of both instructors and students will be clear at the outset of each course. The LOGs emphasize a learner-centered approach in that the curriculum will be laid out in advance for students. Those students who are able to work ahead will have the freedom to explore the curriculum as they plot their own learning pace and pathway.

While students will need a more learner-focused approach to education to develop skills necessary for success in the new workplace, they will also come to expect a different pedagogical approach from tertiary institutions. The term consumer as a synonym for student has found its way into the vernacular of educational discourse. While this might offend many, its reality can be readily seen in most educational environments where concepts such as "customer service" herald a new era for educators. Students themselves, many of whom are required to shoulder greater fiscal responsibility for their education as various levels of government accede responsibility to the end-user, will begin demanding more empowering instructional approaches. Students will not abide the over-crowded, time-and-place-dependant lecture theatre when new technologies can just as readily facilitate the lecture-based form of information transfer. Rather, students will look to instructors and peers for activities that will facilitate learning in a collaborative environment. Learning Outcome Guides are designed to facilitate just this form of activity. As learner-focused tools that will facilitate the transfer of information, LOGs are meant to complement classroom activities by enabling a learning group to collectively explore information.

The Digital Curriculum Database: The Challenge of Web Based Curriculum Delivery

Consistent Approach

Typical instructors are content experts in their field of expertise; however, they are usually not pedagogical experts and, left to their own devices, are capable of producing large quantities of content with little thought to instructional design. The LOGging our Curriculum project includes a provision to generate Web pages consistent with the content available in the database. This approach ensures that a LOG that is printed, displayed on the Web, or used to generate Web pages will have a consistent "look and feel" and will ensure a pedagogically sound design.

Web Page Creation

NAIT has adopted WebCT as its standard Web curriculum delivery tool. Integrating WebCT with the LOGging our Curriculum project will spawn files that trick WebCT into thinking that it created the course instead of the course being generated by the LOGging our Curriculum software. Similarly, this course is then populated with Web pages generated from the LOGging our Curriculum database. Without the instructor’s ever entering WebCT, a complete WebCT course is created. This approach not only achieves standardization but also absolves the instructor from learning HTML since entered text is automatically converted.

LOGging Our Curriculum: A Vision for the Future

LOGging Our Curriculum is a project that will position NAIT for the future of learning. In the new millennium, students will arrive at NAIT’s doors with considerably different needs and expectations. From their primary school days onward, students will be increasingly exposed to technologies such as the Internet that facilitate independent learning and self-inquiry. These will be confident and technologically literate individuals who will demand learning that meets their personal requirements. LOGging Our Curriculum is the first step in a process that will offer more on-demand learning for students. Other institutional measures will be required such as better access to network resources, greater accessibility of instructional staff (both electronically and face-to-face), and greater acknowledgement of past learning through systematic approaches to prior learning assessment and recognition.

Many of these changes are anathema to the culture of academic environments. However, the revolution in learning has already begun. One need only look at the proliferation of online distance education programs throughout the world to understand that innovation in academic environments is upon us. Technical institutes face a particularly difficult challenge as they find themselves most directly affected by the revolution going on in industry. However, by responding quickly to those global economic forces, technical institutions are positioned to be the leaders in learning innovation.

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