– Hi, I’m Lorri Barnett. I am the Senior Director of Professional Development for Quality Matters, which is based in the United States. Quality Matters is a research-based framework for designing high quality online and hybrid courses. And the activities that we are going to do in this session use QM principles to strengthen alignment, clarity, and student success. I am also an adjunct faculty for Purdue Polytechnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, which is considered the Midwestern part of the United States. In this activity, we’re going to look at how to take a great teaching idea and align it with your outcomes, activities, and assessments. This activity helps educators see whether a great teaching idea, like a journal, a project, or a discussion actually measures the learning outcome that they think it does, which is at the heart of QM’s concept of alignment, which is our General Standards 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

This activity comes directly from my own experience teaching online at Purdue University. Having come to Quality Matters nearly three years ago, it became very evident when I evaluated my own course issues with QM’s rubric that I needed to make some improvements. So this happens to align well to a written project that I have my students do. I teach online asynchronous leadership and business courses for undergraduate students inside a four-year institution. So for one of my leadership classes, I have a substantial written project journal that students must complete for their midterm. Students were submitting these assignments online. They were writing a lot, but I kept seeing comments at the end of their submission containers like, “I’m not sure why we’re doing this,” or, “How does this align to the course goals that you have outlined?” This happened to be my wake up call for alignment. The same thing can happen with discussions. Students are active and they appear to be engaged, but they do not see the connection to learning or to the grade that they are receiving.

Alignment means that your outcome, your activity, and your assessment criteria are all working together as a system. When those pieces line up, students actually see what success looks like and why the work that you’re having them do matters. This idea of alignment is grounded in our QM Higher Education Rubric, but we are going to apply it today very practically to just one assignment. By forcing outcomes, student tasks, and grading criteria into one row of the worksheet, it makes it very visible where expectations might be vague, mismatched, or invisible to students. And this happens to be a very common misalignment problem that we see every day.

We are now going to work on an actual example from a worksheet. The purpose of this three-column course alignment worksheet is to use it to check whether a major assignment in your course is clearly connected to what your students are expected to learn, what they are actually gonna do, and how their work is assessed. This activity is based on the alignment principle highlighted in the Quality Matters concept materials. The QM connection is that in our Higher Ed Rubric, alignment means that learning objectives, assessments, instructional materials, and learning activities are intentionally connected so students can achieve their desired outcomes. This worksheet helps faculty examine that alignment at the assignment level by asking them to compare what students are expected to learn, what they actually do, and how their work is evaluated.

So, in our worksheet example that you see here, we are going to pick an assignment. And any assignment that you wanna work on and use the worksheet to align would be great. In this particular assignment, I picked a journal. This was the journal that I spoke about that I was seeing misaligned. And the first thing that you wanna do is fill the columns of your worksheet, and in column one, put the exact learning outcome your assignment addresses. So if you notice, mine says, “Analyze competing leadership approaches in a workplace scenario.” That is column one. Column two, describe what your students actually do and use student-friendly language. So mine reads, “Read three short case studies and write a one-page summary of each one.” And then in the third column, write out what you look for when you grade. What are you looking for? Your real criteria. And so I have 40% completion, 30% grammar, 20% formatting, and 10% submitted on time. And that is the assignment as it now currently stands inside my syllabus.

Now, you wanna do an alignment check and look at what stands out as incorrect in this example. This particular row is misaligned because we’re asking the students to analyze something, but the activity asks them to summarize. And then when you get over to the grading, I am looking at surface features rather than evidence. And so I have a misalignment on the directions that I tell students to do one way, and then I’m measuring the criteria in a completely different way. So, your worksheet directions absolutely will help you pull out the problem. When you wanna analyze, evaluate, and create your activities, your grading needs to do the very same thing, which we are not doing here. Let’s look at how this could be revised and reflected in a much better alignment manner. So this task, as I have it, did not require comparison, judgment, or explanation of reasoning. And then the grading criteria do not measure that students can’t analyze the leadership approaches that I asked them to write about. So, if you look at the revision that we have here, you can see that the learning outcome is analyze competing leadership approaches in a workplace scenario. That is my learning outcome.

What I want students to actually do inside this assignment is read three case studies, and, then, I want them to compare two leadership approaches and explain which approach is most effective for one scenario using evidence from the case. So you can see that, immediately, that analyze is done inside that second box there, and that I have lined that up much more explicitly. And then how am I going to grade this in the third column is I’m going to look at the quality of comparison, 40% for that. I’m going to look at their use of evidence for a 30% of their grade. And then I need to look at 20% for their explanation of reasoning. And then 10% is gonna be focused on their clarity and their organization. This will align much better to what the student expectations are, and then how you’re going to a grade that, and keep it into the alignment that it needs to be. You need to ask yourself: “Do my verbs and my cognitive level match across each row? Would a student be able to understand what success looks like? Does your grading actually measure the content, the outcome?”

Choose one small revision, revise it, then revise your instructions, and then see if the criteria lines up much better when you’re finished. Aligning even one assessment strengthens the coherence of your course and it’ll give your students a much clearer path to success. Thanks for working through this activity with me today. If you found it helpful, I encourage you to complete the worksheet for one course that you are teaching now and notice what changes for your students. OneHE has more micro-learning resources, and Quality Matters offer deep frameworks and peer review to support your ongoing online coursework. The resources for these worksheets may be found below this video.