Testimonial written by Shree Iyengar, Director of Learning Outcomes Assessment
Anne Arundel Community College (AACC) is one of the largest two-year colleges in Maryland, with an annual enrollment of about 21,000 credit students and 36,000 non-credit students. We offer 32 associate degree programs and a number of certificates and letters of recognition. With a full-time faculty count nearing 250 and a part-time count of about 600, we are a growing institution serving the community needs in Maryland.
Embracing a Learner-centered Viewpoint
The college has a well-established process for developing and modifying courses and programs through the workings of the Educational Policies Committee (EPC), which is mainly composed of faculty. One of the college’s strategic goals speaks to making all courses at AACC outcomes-based, allowing faculty to link assessment of student learning to course outcomes. In designing and implementing action plans to meet the strategic goal, the faculty and staff needed to learn about outcomes-based assessment and to begin to think of designing and offering courses from a learner-centered viewpoint. We adopted WIDS mainly because it addressed the dual purpose of facilitating design of courses from a learner-centered angle and linking assessment of student learning to performance expectations.
A Common Language
Initially we experienced some frustration in adapting WIDS to our needs. The main reason was that earlier we had developed our own language of assessment and a template for developing course outcomes. Our initial assessment language in the template did not match the language of WIDS. Once we decided we would benefit from WIDS, we continued our conversations and turned the corner getting familiar with the language of the software. We no longer use our ‘course outcomes template’ and it is all WIDS when we develop new courses or modify the existing ones. While faculty are being trained to use sound principles of instructional design through the deployment of WIDS, instructional support staff learn the navigational aspects of the software to assist faculty in shaping the course outcome documents to meet the requirements of the college.
Faculty Have Benefited
The use of WIDS in the last five years has resulted in a number of benefits to the faculty and staff of AACC:
- Traditionally, faculty members in most disciplines are not trained to think in terms of outcomes, competencies, Bloom’s Taxonomy or assessment tasks. As more faculty learn to use WIDS, they become more familiar with the language of assessment. This helps the assessment process at the college.
- The discussions among faculty and staff during WIDS training sessions are rich; they learn from each other, exchanging pedagogical ideas and assessment techniques that work for their classes.
- Developing course competencies in WIDS has streamlined the process of documenting some of the assessment efforts for the college. All course outcome summaries are posted on the college intranet as they become available. Thus far, about 157 of the 212 courses that have stated course outcomes are in the WIDS format.
- Beginning in fall 2004 the Educational Policies Committee required that all new course proposals at AACC be accompanied by a WIDS document listing course competencies, linked core abilities and learning objectives. The format of the WIDS document was simple enough to be adopted by faculty and staff. In the last two academic years about 60 new courses were developed using WIDS!
- Some departments are beginning to use WIDS to create course syllabi and program outcome documents for new programs.
WIDS Wizards Make the Process Easier
The recent software updates have reached a level of sophistication that make training and use relatively easy for faculty and staff. The number of examples of WIDS documents available on the college intranet has brought a level of comfort to colleagues at AACC. It is serendipitous that the EPC’s required elements for any new course are reflected exactly in the Course Outcome Summary Wizard in WIDS! This will make the job of our WIDS trainer less challenging and the training sessions more fun for participating faculty and staff.
The Next Phase
We are marching forward. Our big push in the next phase of implementation of WIDS is to get faculty to use the software to develop course syllabi in shorter training sessions. The Syllabus Wizard is a great tool for this purpose. The fact that a syllabus or a Course Outcome Summary document can now be saved as an MSWord document without using the Publisher part of WIDS is a timesaver for the user. We compliment the WIDS technical crew for their insight and expertise in providing the latest updates and extend our gratitude to everyone in the WIDS organization for their support, flexibility, professionalism and willingness to listen to the end-users.