Yes, it may be Week 11, but it’s not too late to check in with your students about course outcomes. Devoting part of a class to examining course learning outcomes and their connection to specific activities and assignments can help you and your students see what they have already accomplished. It can also help refocus on what needs to happen in the last weeks of the semester in order to maximize student progress toward meeting these goals.

When I reviewed the results from the mid-semester course evaluation, I noticed that many of my students indicated that they felt they had only made “moderate” progress toward the course learning outcomes.  Perhaps that isn’t too bad, considering we were only half way through the semester. However, I decided I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to discuss the outcomes with students in more detail. 

When discussing learning outcomes with students, we can draw from a blog from “The Learning Scientists,” which suggests questions such as the following:

• Using your own words, what does this outcome mean?
• How does this learning outcome relate to something we’ve already learned?
• How will you know if you’ve achieved this outcome?
• Why do you think it’s important that we learn this?

Therefore, I had two main goals: 1) to make sure the students understood each outcome clearly  and 2) to have students reflect on the specific assignments and tasks we had done so far working toward achieving each outcome. 

In order to help facilitate this activity, I decided to use Google JamBoard, an online collaborative white-board that allows students to easily post “sticky notes” and text boxes to share ideas.  I created one “frame” for each outcome. First, I asked individual students to think about a particular outcome and be ready to explain it in their own words. Some students looked up definitions of words (e.g., “substantiate”) and added the definition as a “sticky” or textbox on the JamBoard so their classmates could see it. After reviewing the meaning of the outcomes, I then asked students to post examples of activities or assignments we had done that helped them to achieve each of the outcomes. I suggested they could also look back through Canvas assignments to remind them of some of these activities.

I was pleased with the number of connections students made between the outcomes and activities. For instance,  I could both see where they understood the purpose of the assignment clearly and where I might want to make the connections more explicit. I plan to save their responses and have students add to them one more time before the end of the semester. 

Do I wish I had done more with outcomes earlier in the semester? Maybe. But even midway through, it’s not too late.