What is Learning Outcome Manager?

What is the Learning Outcome Management (LOM) tool? What can it do for students? What can it do for teachers?

These are all pretty good questions, and I wish I could answer them based upon an experience of using the LOM in a course. As I write this, I am about to make use of the assessment tool in my summer composition one course for the very first time. I myself see the LOM as a very worthwhile assessment tool and have been granted the privilege of making use of it for the very first time as part of an Iowa Community College Online Consortium Pilot Study.
I do have a working hypothesis for what to expect after about eight weeks of development of the tool with a remarkable team from eCollege and the Iowa Community College Consortium. I want to share this with you so that we can work together.

Let's start with the definition. Basically, the LOM tool is a way to assess student learning. It holds out the promise of being able to quickly see what a student has accomplished and what that same student still has to learn. Of course, this is known as adaptive learning. For example, if half of my students demonstrate they do not comprehend the thesis and how to apply it within an essay, then I can adapt a lesson is physically aimed at those students. Meanwhile, those who demonstrate they do comprehend how to use the thesis can move forward in the course more quickly.

As teachers, we have all heard the following question: how do we know that the students have learned what we have instructed? The easy answer is that we give grades. The longer answer is one that can be debated, and seldom agreed upon, throughout the night. We all know the question. What we are searching for is an answer.

What is needed, then, is a way to connect our learning objectives (what we want students to accomplish) to the actual student performance on assignments. Agreeing upon those objectives is the most difficult phase of setting up the LOM tool, but it is not impossible. English teachers may argue over what grade to award but they generally agree upon what needs to be included in an essay to be considered a quality one.

The challenge here is to make a list of learning objectives. For example, I want the students in my Composition I class to be able to effectively write a thesis when composing an essay. My learning objective states, "Students will be able to write a thesis that states and opinion, supports why it is true, and demonstrate why it matters." Plainly and simply, that is my learning objective for the thesis. This shows my age a bit, I suppose, but I was also taught that these are what are known as SWBATs (Students Will Be Able To).

Thus, we teachers then can identify all our objectives for the students in writing an essay. I have 25 objectives that I commonly use in scoring those essays. These are tied to the objectives in our Course Development Model (CDM) that all of our English teachers at our institution have been working from for over 25 years. Other institutions may call the CDM by another name, or perhaps works from a shared syllabus, but most will have some sort of master document stating the objectives. The first thing to do, then, is to consider the list of objectives that we say the students will learn in our course. If you teach the essay, then the goal is to list what your objectives are. Teachers of other disciplines can easily list their own objectives for students in a course.

To summarize, we have talked about the need for clarity in our objectives in working with students. The very first thing you think about, then, is the creation of that list. Next time we will discuss how to create a rubric.