Dear Colleagues,
Are you working on your syllabus for next semester? If so, the Academic Affairs team encourages you to take a fresh look at the learning outcomes for your course. Learning outcomes are a required component for UT syllabi and beneficial to your students. They articulate the attitudes students will foster, the skills they will practice, and the knowledge they will acquire by the conclusion of your course. We have developed a resource that contains strategies and examples that will make drafting learning outcomes quicker and easier, and lead to clear outcomes that help students know what they will be able to achieve at the end of your course and what is expected of them.
The Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) guide is a visual resource that walks you through writing three different types of learning outcomes. The guide:
  • explains the purpose of each type of outcome,
  • describes different levels of outcomes,
  • suggests ways to assess how you will know if the learning has taken place,
  • gives examples of assignments you can use to assess outcomes, and
  • lists examples of learning outcomes that may help you write your own.
The SLO guide is the first in a series of resources developed for the Course Clarity Project, an Academic Affairs initiative to help you plan an effective course. Resources on aligning your outcomes with assessments and activities, and developing rubrics are being developed in 2024.
If this is the first time you are writing learning outcomes for your class, don’t worry about striving for perfection — developing learning outcomes is a process that unfolds over time. You may have an outcome that you feel confident about and refer to explicitly in class throughout the semester. You may also discover midway through a semester that you have left out key outcomes on your initial list. That’s OK, you can always tweak them and share changes with your students, which is a great way to model how learning evolves.
For those who feel comfortable drafting learning outcomes and integrating them into your course, take a fresh look at your outcomes for the upcoming semester and see if there are ways to make them even clearer and more actionable for your students. Bookmark the SLO guide so you can refer back to it whenever you need a hand. You might also want to reach out to a colleague and have them read over your learning outcomes and offer to read theirs. It can be helpful to get an outside perspective on the way you’re framing the key outcomes for a class.
Research indicates that clearly written course learning outcomes are foundational for instructors to be intentional about their teaching (Biggs & Tang, 2011), opening up valuable opportunities to refer to learning outcomes throughout the semester. Learning outcomes also help students understand what they are expected to learn throughout the course (Mahajan & Sing, 2017) and how they are being evaluated, leading to deliberate learning practices that can deepen their learning (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tescher-Romer, 2003). 
Additionally, you will find it easier to design and grade assignments, because you can base them on the desired learning outcomes. We promise that once you start adding specific learning outcomes to your syllabus, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without them. If you got this far, go to the SLO guide and bookmark it for when you’re ready to work on your course syllabi.
Sincerely,
ART MARKMAN |  Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin | provost.utexas.edu
You have received this email as a member of Faculty – Official.
View this email online.
The University of Texas at Austin | Austin, TX | 78712 US