Charles Coe
Technology and Curriculum Innovation
The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology
11762 – 106 Street
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
T5G 2R1
Tel: 780.491.8423
Email: ccoe@nait.ab.ca
This paper describes a project being undertaken at The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Titled, Logging Our Curriculum, the project involves creating a fully outcomes-based curriculum across the institution and housing that curriculum in a database that is accessible to NAIT instructors over the World Wide Web. The instructors are then able to create courses using this curriculum and serve the content over the Web. The goals of the project are to:
 | Provide instructors with the tools necessary to create pedagogically sound Web based curriculum without having to learn new technologies.
| Provide students with more learner-centered materials that follow a pedagogically accepted instructional design model.
| Provide a standard, simple approach to Internet course delivery.
| |
Keywords:LOGging, curriculum, database, learning objects
As do all organizations in the tertiary education sector, technical institutions face unique challenges as they strive to fulfill their traditional roles in an increasingly global economy that is being transformed by technological innovation. 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.
Factors affecting the ability to respond to new educational realities include: curriculum renewal and currency, meeting the needs of the students and the development of web based curriculum. An institution wide approach to curriculum renewal and redesign is needed to remain relevant to industry and competitive with other educational institutions. The process of maintaining curriculum currency is often left to individual instructors who admirably endeavor to teach, maintain currency in their disciplinary fields, and redevelop curriculum.
The second critical factor that is forcing change in traditional practice relates to the learning needs of today’s student. Students are demanding alternate approaches 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 to meet the student’s schedule and learning needs, is the demand for life-long learning opportunities. Many institutions are rushing to meet these demands, but on an institute-wide basis, the approach is generally inconsistent at best and chaotic at worst.
The third factor affecting technical institutions is the daunting task of the development and maintenance of current online curriculum. Currently at many educational institutions instructors develop courses in isolation. The process of updating curriculum is done at this level and is not available to others who teach similar curriculum. Web development efforts are often met with strong opposition because instructors are resistant to learning HTML or other Web technologies. These issues may end up at the bargaining table as part of a collective agreement. Also, the development process taxes individuals and requires more time and effort than is often available. In addition, the design of most online course is at the discretion of the instructor and may not reflect the institute style guidelines or image. In many ways, the design and development of online curriculum strike at the heart of the very culture of education both technical and otherwise.
The second critical factor that is forcing change in traditional practice relates to the learning needs of today’s student. Students are demanding alternate approaches 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 to meet the student’s schedule and learning needs, is the demand for life-long learning opportunities. Many institutions are rushing to meet these demands, 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 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, but the process of introducing those competencies into the curriculum has become increasingly challenging because of the rapid changes taking place in industry and the time required to develop curriculum. A systematic and routine process for ensuring a sound curriculum design process is just now being addressed.
The need to normalize the process of effective curriculum renewal in the face of variable industry dynamics has led to establishing an institutional curriculum database. 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 that allows for the seamless transfer of outcome-based curriculum to the Web.
A continuing challenge for NAIT instructors has been the incorporation 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 provides instructors with a process to normalize the function of curriculum validation and renewal in the context of an instructor’s regular work. VALIDATOR, a NAIT developed Web-based instrument that is easily operated by instructors, provides the technology to make this process easy. The process will generate a Web survey, drawn from the curriculum database, the results of which 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.
For those technologies that require industry accreditation, then the Web-based ACCREDITATOR may be used to match the accrediting bodies outcome requirements with the outcomes stored in the curriculum database.
The development of Web courses at NAIT is realized with the additional tool called MERLIN+. The “fill in the blanks” approach taken by MERLIN+ results in sound curriculum development yet is sufficiently flexible for instructors to draw on their own personal teaching artistry. 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 curriculum database is not simply a means to ensure a valid series of learning outcomes is assembled to meet the demands of industry, it also provides the backbone for the creation of outcome-based online 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 benefits the student 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.
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 will 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. LOGs can be delivered online using the Web. All students’ taking Web courses at NAIT will encounter the same experiential learning design. Since the LOGs emphasize a learner-centered approach in that the curriculum, students who are able to work ahead will have the freedom to explore the curriculum as they plot their own learning pace and pathway.
Web course that are “LOGged” provide learners with a learner-centered collaborative learning environment. As a learner-focused tool that will facilitate the transfer of information, LOGs are meant to form the basic structure of online courses as well as to complement classroom activities by enabling a learning group to collectively explore information.
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.
NAIT has adopted WebCT as its standard Web curriculum delivery tool. Integrating Web 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 Web course is created. This approach not only achieves standardization but also absolves the instructor from learning HTML since entered text is automatically converted.
Through recent experimentation it has been found that Blackboard is also easily adapted to this curriculum generation process.
Main Entry: Mer·lin+
Pronunciation: mûrl
n
Function: noun
Etymology: Medieval Latin Merlinus, from Middle Welsh Myrddin : a prophet and magician in Arthurian legend 1
While looking to the future, NAIT realized that it could not ignore
the past, and since the LOGging Our Curriculum project is truly magical
in nature, it was an easy decision to name the software
LOGging Our Curriculum project and its compliment of technology tools; MERLIN+, VALIDATOR and ACCREDITATOR 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. Creating outcome based online curriculum using MERLIN+ and Web will provide instructors with the tools necessary to create pedagogically sound web-based curriculum with ease. In addition, the systematic approach to curriculum renewal offers a campus wide approach to online design and learning environments that meets the needs of the students and the institute and industry.
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.
1Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition copyright © 1999 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated.
Name: Charles Coe
Department: Learning Technology
Institution: Northern Alberta Institution of Technology
Postal address: 11762 - 106 St., Edmonton, Alberta T5G 2R1
E-mail address: ccoe@nait.ab.ca
Web address: http://www.nait.ab.ca/digilearn/
Questions may be addressed to: George Tsiknis