WIDS Provides Standards Alignment Solutions

Aligning programs and courses to national academic, accreditation, or occupational compliance standards adds credibility and accountability to your curriculum by providing objective third-party benchmarks. The alignment process, however, can be challenging.

Aligning standards with WIDS

WIDS consultants have extensive experience helping educators and trainers align content to standards for K-12, military, academic, and occupational programs. Through careful analysis of content, learning activities, and assessments, WIDS consultants:

• determine the most appropriate standards set(s) to apply
• determine specific courses/units that support or meet a standard set
• identify the activities that support often broadly written or abstract standard language
• identify which standards may be applicable across multiple courses/units

In addition, clients who use WIDS software can use features designed for alignment to:

• import whole standard sets with one click
• link standards to your programs, units, and courses
• link standards to specific course-level outcomes
• export alignment maps to use for course, program, and unit alignment analysis

Many clients use WIDS generated reports and maps to identify critical alignment gaps allowing for pinpointed revisions.

Linking occupational standards

WIDS has consulted with a variety of occupational organizations to meet national and state standards requirements for programs and courses including:

• Supporting Care Coordination System in Akron, OH, in aligning its Community Health Worker training to more than 10 sets of standards
• Annually facilitating the alignment of national occupational standards across multiple programs shared by 16 colleges in the Wisconsin Technical College System
 

Linking K-12 academics to standards

WIDS has consulted with a number of clients to align both state and national standard sets to curriculum including:

• WIDS mapped learning objectives to state and national standards and provided hundreds of correlation reports for 23 Junior Achievement programs.
• WIDS assisted Boston Public School System in mapping course learning objectives from 70+ courses to Common Core standards throughout their K-12 Arts Program curriculum.
• WIDS helped Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth map more than 100 courses to several national K-12 and College Board AP course standards.
• WIDS regularly guides Army JROTC through updating their four-year high school curriculum and has aligned more than 100 lesson outcomes to multiple national standards.

Experienced WIDS consultants make standards alignment easy by offering focused recommendations for standards-driven curriculum development and alignment while WIDS software supports accurate standards alignment mapping and related alignment documentation for all stakeholders.   

WIDS (Worldwide Instructional Design System) is a nonprofit organization that provides curriculum design software, consulting, and training services.  Download the free WIDS Curriculum Map.

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