Faculty Responsibility for Learning Goals

The faculty in aggregate (either in total, in representative units, in disciplinary units, or through some other organizational structure) will normally be the persons responsible for listing and defining the school's learning goals.  Different schools have developed different structures and procedures for creating learning goals; deep involvement of faculty members in the process is a critical feature of whatever mechanisms the school uses.  Agreement on learning goals for academic programs is one of the central defining features of higher education, and thus, faculty involvement/ownership is a necessary ingredient.

After setting the learning goals, the faculty must decide where the goals will be addressed within degree curricula.  What coursework or learning experiences provided by the academic pursuit of degrees will help students to achieve the goals?  Goals may be course specific, or they may be spread throughout the curriculum, or both.  For example, a learning goal stated as "ability to express complex business matters in writing" may be a part of a business communications course, and it also may be addressed in required writing projects in additional courses.

Once faculty members have decided which components of the curriculum will contain certain learning goals, they must establish monitoring mechanisms to ensure that the proper learning experiences occur.  Course syllabi, examinations, and projects should be regularly reviewed to see that learning experiences are included to prepare students to accomplish the intended learning goals.  While this monitoring activity does not require elaborate processes, it must be regular, systematic, and sustained.

Beyond choosing and developing the list of learning goals, faculty members must operationalize the learning goals by specifying or developing the measurements that assess learning achievement on the learning goals.  Obviously, operationalization of the learning goals is the ultimate step in the definition process.  No matter how carefully the goals have been determined, making them operational through actual measurements is the definition.  While the school may engage the assistance of strategic consultants in the creation of the list of goals or measurement consultants in the operationalization of goals, faculty members cannot abnegate their own responsibility for final definitions of goals and measurements.