Misunderstood – CLOs and EoPs

A response to the Misunderstood Activity
created by Jessica Pearce (@jessica.pearce)

Number of views: 234

When working with faculty on course development, I notice some have problems understanding the purpose of Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) and Elements of Performance (EoPs), found on Course Outlines. Often, faculty want to list CLOs as topics that begin with the word “understand.” For example: “Understand the social, political, and cultural impacts of colonization on First Nations peoples of Canada.” 

This part isn’t really an analogy, but go with it… I always ask an instructor, “How do you think students ‘understand’ something? How do you ‘understand’ something?” This often leads to a discussion on how students best learn. At this point, I explain how we need to include relevant action-verbs in our CLOs that clearly state HOW a student is learning (are they describing, explaining, completing, analyzing, planning, designing, etc.)? So, the above CLO could be restated as “Analyze the social political, and cultural impacts of colonization on First Nations peoples of Canada.” 

This part is more of the analogy. When we move onto writing EoPs for each CLO, many faculty are unaware of what EoPs do. Often, instructors think CLOs are enough. To explain the purpose of an EoP, I tell them to think of EoPs as “stepping stones” along a road that get you to your final destination, which is the CLO. Students must step on each stone first, in order to reach the final step, the CLO. We then brainstorm ideas for EoPs or “stepping stones” learners must complete to allow them to reach the final destination.