Saylor101: Saylor Course Development

Unit 3: Current Course Development Activities

• Unit 3 Learning Outcomes Page

• 3.1: Learning Outcome Revision and Realignment

  There are several types of development projects typical to Saylor course development. These are outlined below. Of course, the specifics will vary somewhat from course to course, but the general process will remain largely intact. For nearly all development projects, the initial activity will be to review the existing learning outcomes and course structure. Saylor’s existing learning outcomes were created to serve as guideposts during content pairing and assessment development. Ongoing learning outcome updates serve to improve the outcomes so that they may be more easily assessed. Prior to your engagement, the learning outcomes will have been updated by Saylor’s instructional design staff to ensure testability, course content alignment, and cognitive range. You will be asked to evaluate these outcomes and implement necessary revisions focused on the subject-matter side of the equation, looking especially at the essential domains to cover, appropriate sequencing, the relative weight of each outcome, and so forth. In addition to any specific questions noted in the learning objectives document, you should evaluate the objectives based on the following questions:

  • Are the revised objectives appropriate for the course content and level of the course?
    
  • Are the revised objectives of the same relative importance? (indicate any which are more or less important)
    
  • Is the collection of objectives inclusive of the most important things a student should get from a course?
    
  • If there are missing objectives, are those objectives best assessed via multiple-choice final exam?

  • BUS101 Learning Outcomes URL

    Saylor staff and consulting faculty recently collaborated to revise the learning outcomes for BUS101. Please read through these learning outcomes to get a sense of what we are looking for.

• 3.2: Open Content Updates

  When we first set out to design courses, we made the decision to include copyrighted materials in our content aggregation process. However, after several years of course development work, it became clear that this model was creating challenges. We found ourselves with dozens of nearly complete courses that were succumbing to broken links, and recognized that our permissions outreach had been received with a modest rate of positive return. To this end, one of our primary development activities is focused on replacing course resources held under traditional copyrights with openly licensed materials. 

  If you are working on open content updates, you will be provided with a list of the materials needing replacement as well as possible open content replacements. Your primary tasks will be to vet the replacement resources or identify suitable alternatives and situate them within the existing course structure by pairing them to the subunit structure, adding instructions and content framing notes, and aligning the resources to learning outcomes. You may make modest revisions to the course structure (the blueprint elements) to appropriately frame the open replacement content, as needed.

• 3.3: Assessment Development

  Because Saylor students learn independent from instructor feedback or regular interaction with peers, active learning components -- such as assessments -- are especially critical to Saylor courses. Our courses generally rely on three categories of assessment: 

  End of Unit Assessments (EOUAs): More formal, approximately 10-20 item auto-graded quizzes that come at the conclusion of each unit. EOUAs are unit-summative, covering all of the unit-outcomes for a given unit. EOUAs include explanatory feedback that accompanies the answer choices. This feedback is provided once students have submitted their answers and serves to help students understand how or why their answers are correct or incorrect. Note that the explanation a student sees is contingent upon their answer selection, and each explanation should function as its own whole. The goal of these is to prepare students for both the content and format of the final exam. With the explanatory feedback, the EOUAs also offer an opportunity for targeted remediation. 

  Final Exam: This is the only component of a Saylor course that carries an official grade. Saylor final exams are course­-summative and made up of multiple-­choice items. Students must earn a 70% or higher on the exam to pass, and they may take a non-credit exam as many times as they'd like, with an enforced waiting period of 7 days between attempts for non-proctored exams, and 14 days between attempts for proctored exams. Credit-recommended exams can only be taken a maximum of three timers per student. The goal of the final exam is to assess a student's mastery of stated learning objectives. Final exam items should not include explanatory feedback.

  Other Active Learning Opportunities: This category includes all assessments and activities that are not final exams or EOUAs. They are generally more informal quizzes, guided activities, discussion prompts, or practice that primarily serve to engage students and foster mastery. Where appropriate, these opportunities should include rubrics or other guides to responding to support student self-evaluation. As with all other course materials, these activities must be learning outcome-aligned.

  • Saylor Academy's Assessment Creation Guidelines URL

    Please read this document very carefully. A major part of our current pedagogical strategy is creating new assessment items and improving assessments that are already in the courses. Be prepared to meet assessment items' minimum standards. You will be able to reference this document for examples of various exemplars of good assessment items and not-so-good assessment items.

• 3.4: Implementing Peer Review and External Review Recommendations

  Saylor employs a number of quality checks on our courses. We aim to have all of our courses undergo our own expert peer review process. Saylor peer reviewers have experience teaching the course(s) they review, and are provided with a detailed questionnaire to evaluate the course materials (see below). Additionally, a growing number of our courses have already undergone or are slated to undergo external reviews by credit recommending bodies or credit transfer partner schools. In any of these cases, the reviews elicit areas for improvement and are generally conducted by a panel of 2-4 reviewers. If you are implementing review feedback, you will likely need to work with Saylor staff to implement any number of specific points of feedback including replacing content, altering content sequencing or coverage, adjusting or adding assessment strategies, or a variety of other possible tasks. The specific areas for improvement will be outlined in a review report, which you will interpret alongside Saylor staff to ensure the updates implemented meet the identified areas for improvement. The course improvements that you plan to implement will likely fall under the general categories outlines above.
  

  • Saylor Academy's Peer Review Packet URL

    Read this document to get a sense of the Academy's priorities in conducting course quality assurance reviews and implementing expert feedback.