Whittling Down the Curriculum

Your learning outcomes will need to specify the minimum acceptable standard for a student to be able to pass a course or program (threshold level). This means that it is important to express learning outcomes in terms of the essential learning for a program or course, so it’s best to have a small number of learning outcomes that are of central importance, not a large number of peripheral outcomes.

Most of us find we have more items that we would like to include than would be manageable as outcomes. To whittle that list down, it helps to categorize them as topics or skills that students must know to pass the course, should know, or could know, as shown in the graphic. In all likelihood, only items in the “must know” category will become learning outcomes. The other items may be ones that would help differentiate student work at the level of a pass from that at a higher level.

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