On 13 June 2012 17:11, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
It might be worth talking to potential accreditors earlier rather than later in the process (although not having already spoken to them two days in is forgiveable!). One thing you'll need to agree with them in the learning objectives, and they should be worked out before you get too far with producing content.
So getting into more detail: what I'm proposing to do for WMUK myself includes four "baseline" tasks. One of those I didn't mention as a subproject, but it is the step of taking the baseline list of topics and rendering it into a baseline list of specifications of modules. So the spec here will be a standardised "what you will learn" at least. Technically you'd work with separate "aims" and "objectives", and having been told by a Board member that "objectives" should be at least potentially measurable, getting that deep at the baseline stage might be too much. I think I have to work out version control and categorisation of modules before knowing everything about what to do here. Spec might just mean a sensible two-category system first.
I suspect there might be some confusion here caused by there being two different meanings of "objective" that are relevant to this project. There are the learning objectives of the course, ie. what should the student know/be able to do by the end of the course that they didn't know/weren't able to do at the start? Then, there are the objectives of the project, which the chapter uses to judge whether the project is a success. I suspect the board member was saying that the project's objectives need to be measurable (for example, you might have an objective to teach 150 courses to at least 100 different students with a pass-rate of at least 80% and a student satisfaction of at least 75% - I'm picking numbers out of thin air, of course, the real numbers need to be based on what is realistically achievable).
Assessment of the students is a separate question, and another one that any accreditor would want to discuss. You can fix problems with assessment later, though. Problems with learning objectives need to be fixed before people spend too much time creating learning materials, which is why I mentioned them.