Celebrating CBE at GOA: Semester 1 2016-2017

Below are links to a number of GOA courses that are leading the way as we reorient toward a competency-based approach. At GOA, all courses are absolutely open to all members of the faculty - so you should be able to share links with colleagues and peek into faculty members' courses whenever you like.

If you are not a member of the GOA faculty and would like more information on some of the links below (to which you may not have access) - reach out to jason.cummings@globalonlineacademy.org

To be sure, none of our classes have totally arrived at the CBE promised land, but here are a few that are moving in interesting directions

Feel free to explore these courses (and any others that seem interesting) to your heart's content. That said, we have provided a little context for you and some direct links to various parts of the courses in order to highlight some particular practices.

Don't worry about the technical side of how to achieve these things in Canvas. When the time comes, you can use #-tech_help to tap into the Canvas expertise of the whole faculty! For now, let's just think about the pedagogical implications.

Power: Redressing Inequity through Data

David Peabody (University Prep) built Power: Redressing Inequity through Data from scratch for Semester 1 of 2016-2017 - which is akin to building a plane as you fly it. One of the benefits that new courses have had, however, is that they have been able to consider GOA's approach to CBE as they imagine what their course will look like (instead of retrofitting something they've been teaching for a couple of years). A couple of specific things that David does in this course are: first, he always puts the competencies that he is targeting on his weekly overview pages, and second, he includes these great weekly overview videos that give the students a great window into who he is, where he lives etc. See these examples.

Week 14 Overview
Week 9 Overview

Then, David asks the students to submit a competency-based self assessment of their "online presence" at the end of the week. As you can see, he varies the rubric from week to week.

Finally, he makes explicit reference in his mid-term comments to the competencies with which the student has been strong, and those that she should focus on going forward.

Bioethics

Jessica Gould (American School in Japan) did a lot of meaningful work with competencies in Bioethics. She makes a point of drawing attention to the discipline-specific competencies on her module introduction pages.

Unit 4 Introduction and Timeline
Unit 3 Introduction and Timeline

Additionally, she uses outcomes related to GOA competencies to assess her student's approach to reflection.

Unit Reflection and Online Presence for Unit 5

Finally, Jessica anchors her feedback solidly in competencies and outcomes. Have a look at the variety of rubrics she has developed using outcomes (and maybe steal a few!). Jessica uses outcomes extensively in her rubrics and provides rich feedback that specifically references these outcomes (see the screenshot below).

Arabic Language Through Culture I

Matt Westman (Kings Academy) and Ala Hamdan (Kings Academy) have been working hard on a new iteration of our popular Arab Language Through Culture course.

As a part of the new iteration they have been very intentional about doing a lot of their assessment using rubrics that are made up of outcomes from both the GOA core and from their own discipline-specific competencies and outcomes. Click here and explore the way that their competencies (in Canvas they're called "Outcome Groups") and outcomes are at the ready in the course outcomes menu (in the left-hand navigation menu). This has allowed them to use outcomes on rubrics routinely in order to track student progress with those outcomes over time.

Examples of assignments using this kind of rubric. Click the "gear" icon in the upper righthand corner of each page to see the rubric:

Filmmaking

Brendan Gill (Catlin Gabel) and Jay Jolton (Blake) have broken a lot of new ground this year in Filmmaking with their skill tree approach to course architecture.

Click here to visit the first skill tree assignment - keep clicking "next" to browse through the projects. You'll note that they use the same approach as the Arabic teachers when it comes to using outcomes on rubrics. How might you use an approach like this to differentiate in your discipline? Would it be by interest? Might the different branches of the tree (so to speak) have different rubrics focusing on different competency areas - and students choose their project having reflected on the skills that they most need to practice?