{"id":115,"date":"2014-04-24T10:06:32","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T10:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/?p=115"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:24:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:24:00","slug":"studentcentred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/2014\/04\/24\/studentcentred\/","title":{"rendered":"Making learning outcomes really student-centred"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Group\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I questioned in a previous blog post <\/a>whether learning outcomes are really deserving of their ‘student-centred’ claim if they are primarily derived by teachers\/lecturers and if we have no real idea about how students are actually using them.<\/p>\n

The ‘Learning Outcomes Project’ team has recently had a paper published <\/a>in which\u00a0we begin to address the issue of how students are using learning outcomes and we are continuing to do further work in this area.\u00a0 This work is vital because for me personally, I\u00a0feel disconnected from\u00a0the idea that learning outcomes are\u00a0‘student-centred’ and are focused on what the student is doing because these outcomes are, in practice, largely handed down to the student from their tutor.\u00a0 To me this means that though\u00a0learning outcomes are expressed from the student perspective, they are still\u00a0primarily teacher-driven.\u00a0 However, all would be different if students themselves were actually involved in the process of creating their learning outcomes.<\/p>\n

I came across this ‘Hey, those are MY learning outcomes!’<\/a> blog post the other day.\u00a0 A key comment for me in this post was:<\/p>\n

a sense of ownership is at the heart of the engagement problem. When we say that learners are \u2018hard-to-engage\u2019, what we really mean is that we don\u2019t know how to get learners to take ownership of new behaviours and learning outcomes.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If we could make learning outcomes ‘the property’<\/a> of the learner and not something just handed down to them, wouldn’t that make them more student-centred and mean that\u00a0students might be more engaged to achieve them?<\/p>\n

In practice, how could this be done?\u00a0 Lecturers and tutors know the module, the assessment and what needs to be covered in the timeframe that they have.\u00a0 Students, particularly at the beginning of a course of module, don’t know a lot of this – they also don’t know what they don’t know and most likely don’t know what they need to know.\u00a0 But they will still have ideas about why they’ve chosen the course or module and\/or what they want to get out of it.\u00a0 I can’t think of any reason why learning outcomes can’t be collaboratively developed by lecturers and their students as the module progresses to take account of what both want to achieve\u00a0from the process.\u00a0 Broader outcomes could still be pre-specified at the beginning of courses to give students an overall view of\u00a0what they will be working towards.\u00a0 But more specific and collaboratively defined ones, that fit within the\u00a0framework of the\u00a0broader ones,\u00a0could develop\u00a0through lecturer and student dialogue and discussion.\u00a0 In this way, students would feel part of a process that is supposed to be ‘student-centred’.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to try here to offer ‘the answer’ as to how collaboratively developed learning outcomes could occur.\u00a0 The process would (and should) be unique to each group and\u00a0learning situation.\u00a0 But I do think it would be worthwhile for every educator to think about how they might or could encourage their students to have a sense of ownership over their learning outcomes, rather than feeling that they are the passive recipients of them.<\/p>\n

I come back to the question I keep asking myself – can learning outcomes really be student-centred if they are, in effect, handed down from on high by their teachers?\u00a0 I just don’t think that they can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I questioned in a previous blog post whether learning outcomes are really deserving of their ‘student-centred’ claim if they are primarily derived by teachers\/lecturers and if we have no real idea about how students are actually using them. The ‘Learning Outcomes Project’ team has recently had a paper published in which\u00a0we begin to address the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":121,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,2],"tags":[17,19,15],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lodebates","category-losinhe","category-uolproject","tag-reflections-on-los","tag-student-experience","tag-writinglos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/loproject\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}