Five phases, grounded in theory, built for adult learner success

The YourPace team, informed by instructor feedback and sound instructional design knowledge, has developed a very useful timeline, based on a 5-phase building period, to help you stay on track with your building, every step of the way.  It is helpful to think about your planning process as a number of steps you can go through to meet your goals and deadlines.  Let’s look at some of the major steps that you will walk through in your initial design process:

  • Receive YourPace course assignment, development expectations, and anticipated date of completion from YourPace Administration.
  • Meet with CTL for CBE design support and modality Q&A
  • Identify approved learning outcomes (PLOs/CLOs) from APPA documentation
  • Begin planning final summative assessment based on measurable learning outcomes

  • Finalize summative assessment
  • Create a course map using the established learning outcomes (ideally one for each module).
  • Name the Modules with meaningful and easy to search titles.
  • Draft a short contextual introduction for each Module description.
  • Complete your Syllabus.

  • Use the Yourpace Brightspace Development Guide to complete the introductory development in Brightspace.
    • Set up the course syllabus, learning outcomes, and rubrics.
    • Add assessments and edit settings.

  • Complete the Build Course Structure section of the YourPace Brightspace Development Guide.
  • Complete the Add the Content & Learning Activities section of the Guide.
  • Complete the Final Assessment setup.
  • Complete the Finishing Up section.

  • Submit completed course for YourPace Instructional Design Quality Assurance Review.
  • Additional Program Review will be completed before the course goes to production.
YourPace final assessment guide yourpace syllabus template YourPace planning guide

Transitioning to the YourPace Mindset

When thinking about how to translate semester-based courses into a CBE course for the YourPace program, it is helpful to shift your mindset from ‘faculty designing a course’ to ‘subject-matter expert designing a competency-based curriculum’. When contracting to design the CBE curriculum that maps to a course, keep the following things in mind:

  • Competency design is outcomes-based. To ensure that the YourPace version of a course is equivalent to the online or F2F course, be sure that the Course Learning Outcomes map to assessment and instructional materials and that they are measured equitably. For this reason, full-time faculty and coordinators will review all CBE courses for alignment.
  • As a course designer, it is helpful to design as if you will not be teaching the course–your assessment rubrics, activity language, and content structure must be clear enough for someone who is not you to follow successfully.
  • Competency-based learning is, by its very nature, skills and application-based, so Course Learning Outcomes must be clear, observable, and measurable. If they are not, our Instructional Design team can help you to craft Module Learning Outcomes that fit these criteria.
  • CBE design is focused on Outcomes first which means that we start at the end–the finished product. After that, we determine what content, practice, and experiences students will need to successfully complete that final assessment.

Note: this page is designed to help you with your course outline and planning process. For more in-depth help with building your designed course in the Learning Management System, please see the Building Your CBE Course page.

Tips for Effective CBE Course Design

  • To support relevance to the real world: Add content that does more than just provide information. Include scenarios, story-telling-based content, and case studies that model the application of the skills.
  • To focus on application & mastery: Be crystal clear about how the content and learning activities support the Course Learning Outcomes which are measured in each Milestone. Clearly communicate how each Milestone and activity connects to the Final Assessment.
  • To transfer ownership and accountability: Encourage students to reflect on how the skills they are learning in this competency can be applied in their current or future careers.
  • To support self-paced and flexible learning: Create opportunities to have voice and choice in project-based assessments.
  • To support holistic development: Engage students in experiential learning that allows students to connect content concepts to career and life goals.
  • To make use of prior knowledge: Identify what life experiences may have prepared learners to succeed in the course and begin Modules with a pre-test to bring to mind what they already know. Conversely, provide resources for learners who may be missing prerequisite knowledge and skills.

What about Peer Learning?

Social Learning Theory and Connectivist theory inform our understanding of the value of interacting with peers and the environment (the digital environment, in the case of connectivism) in the learning process. The challenge with CBE programming–with its rolling admissions and go-at-your-own-pace structure, is that we have to re-think the way that we define peer interaction–indeed, sometimes we even have to re-think what it means to be a peer!

It would not make sense to have a traditional discussion board, where students post and respond to several peers–at any given time, there could be only one student in a competency or only one who is in the section! So how DO we create those social learning and engagement opportunities for YourPace students? Let’s look at a couple of strategies:

Discussions

Prompt students to connect with a topic or activity (or find a connection in their ‘world’), and post in the Discussion Board feature as a learning community activity (not as an assessment–these are not graded). These are a great way for students to make a lasting (meaningful, relevant) impact–even across semesters.

Community Connections

Encourage activities for your Milestones or Final which require the student to reach out into their community for tasks like interviews, case studies, observations and more. You could have students contribute to a publicly accessible forum (such as a performance video and student-created tutorial uploaded to YouTube).

Guidance on CBE Components

During your initial meeting with your Instructional Designer (ID), you will identify the approved Course Learning Outcomes that need to be present in the course. We will ensure that they are clear, observable, and measurable as these CLOs will form the basic structure of your competency (not the content, as is the case in many traditionally formatted live and online classes). Most YourPace courses have between 4 and 7 Course Learning Outcomes.

We will also identify any General Education or Program Learning Outcomes that do not map well to your CLOs as well as any CLOs you may have that are dependent on participation or in-class behavior. These may need to be re-thought or re-tooled for asynchronous, student-paced delivery. Engaging in this process may prompt you to craft CLOs that are even stronger than in the class the competency maps back to–that is okay, just be sure to have a conversation about changes with your program coordinator.

In order to pass the Quality Assurance review, your Course Learning Outcomes must be measurable. If you are working with CLOs that are less than measurable, and you are unable to work with the coordinator to make them more measurable, then you are responsible for creating measurable learning objectives, at the submodule-level, that align with your CLOs.

In the YourPace program, you can throw your list of assignments right out the window. Just kidding–those assignments may be useful if adapting to help you assess students’ ability to apply information from the content in the Milestone Activities and formative quizzes. Some assignments may also be adapted to be useful as a component of the Final Assessment. You may even be able to reuse some of your tests and/or quiz questions in your formative knowledge-check quizzes. What you really need to throw out the window is how you think about assessment. YourPace programming is not designed to assess a collection of project/products and quiz grades that will be weighted into a final grade. The only ‘graded’ assessment in your competency will be the Final Assessment which must be comprised of activities and submissions that explicitly measure all of the Course Learning Outcomes. Likewise, all Milestone Activities need to very clearly measure the knowledge of the related CLO and align explicitly with the rubrics and tasks that will be required in the final.

UMPI prefers, whenever possible, to have a project-based Final Assessment. A project-based Final Assessment could look like one big project or research paper that clearly maps back to ALL CLOs, or it could be a portfolio collection of smaller assignments that each map back to just one or two Learning Outcomes. Talk to your ID to brainstorm Final Assessment ideas and/or needs. They can help you make your assessments more AI resistant.

Milestone Activities are a key element in the competency design process. These interactions between each student and their teaching professor are the instructor’s opportunity to determine the student’s development of key competency skills and knowledge as well as the student’s opportunity to interact in a meaningful and substantive way with their professor. These formative assessments are not graded; rather, they are a student’s chance to apply what they have learned and get feedback from the instructor about whether they are on the right track or not. Milestones should allow the instructor to assess the student’s skillset with the CLO covered as well as prepare students to succeed with relevant skills and tasks they will need to deploy for the Final Assessment. Every YourPace course should have at least 3-5 Milestones to meet the federal regulations for Regular Substantive Interaction. Many developers have one for each CLO.

Milestone’s interactions can be differentiated in submission requirements and in accepted file types, such as a Word DOC, image, or audio/video file. As you are thinking about the appropriate application activities for your competency, keep in mind any technologies that students may have to utilize. For instance, if you need students to use Microsoft Office, you will want to collect and provide information to support students with that tool (CTL can help with that piece if you need assistance). Also, keep in mind that most Milestone Activities across programs are the equivalent of a course assignment rather than a term paper.

You can also choose, when appropriate, to create Knowledge Checks in the form of Formative Quizzes at the end of a Learning Outcome Module. Just be sure that you have enough Milestone Activities to create substantiative interaction between instructor and student.

You may have an CLO (such as an introductory level) that does not need to be assessed with a Milestone, or you may find that two complementary CLOs can be measured with a single Milestone Activity at the conclusion of both, and that is perfectly appropriate. You may even need to create several different parts to a Milestone, such as in the example below:

As faculty working with traditional-aged students, we have developed our curriculum and content to not only include materials essential to our course and discipline but also to help students who are young adults adapt to professional expectations and help them transition to life as a college student (whether that content is around ‘soft-skill’ development or in creating extra-practice modules and re-take/re-dos on assessments).

The CBE model turns this on its head, because these students are already adults, in the workplace, and who already have some college credit. This allows us to free up our content devoted to ‘developing students’, and more directly focus on the materials and learning activities that inform the Course Learning Outcomes, Milestone Activities, and Final Assessment.

In thinking about what content may meet our Outcome needs, we can utilize content that we have used in courses, streaming video, Open Education Resources, images, links to professional journal articles, new original content, and more! As with any online learning design, developing your competency with a variety of different types of content is the key to an engaging learning experience for students.

Designing ‘lean’ does not mean that we are watering-down content or omitting content that is essential for students to know as they build competence in your discipline. It does, however, require us to re-think that content that is great to know but does not explicitly relate to our Learning Outcomes.

OER Commons: a public digital library of open educational resources OpenStax: Peer reviewed open textbooks Pressbooks: Open access books Creative Commons Licenses Demystified
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