FLO tips - Constructive alignment for student engagement

At Flinders, Learning Outcomes (LOs) are a fundamental element of topics and courses. LOs clarify the anticipated knowledge and skills that students gain during their studies. Constructive alignment is the act of intentionally structuring curriculum and learning to build connections between learning outcomes, learning activities and assessments.

Within FLO, you can demonstrate this alignment through practical design strategies that help students to understand how the resources and activities contribute to achieving topic learning outcomes. This in turn motivates students to engage in the topic.

Tip 1: Refer to the learning outcomes (LOs) in the SAM

As outlined in the Good Practice Guide: Developing learning outcomes, the LOs can clarify knowledge and skills and motivate students to engage. As LOs can change over time, referring and linking to these in the Statement of Assessment Methods (SAM), rather than duplicating them is normally recommended. However, in fully online topics, students may need more guidance on how the LOs link to content.

Tip 2: Structure content and activities around LOs and Assessment

Topic design should start with the LOs and the assessment that will enable you to ascertain the students’ success in achieving them, then all content and activities are designed around those. Ask “What do I want the students to achieve in this topic? How will students demonstrate their achievement of these LOs? How will students gain the skills and knowledge to succeed?”
Design to ensure resources, learning outcomes, learning activities, assessments are interconnected and mutually supportive.
Whether the design in FLO is week by week or module by module, the learning content and activities are broken down into easily absorbed segments (“chunking learning”) that are arranged into FLO modules. This material is designed to ensure students are confident with their skills and knowledge to attempt the assessments.

Tip 3: Optimise your FLO site for student understanding

Modules that are arranged by subject matter, topics or themes, can be meaningfully named to create a topic narrative. Present material and activities in multiple ways and formats to ensure diverse learning needs are met.
Within each module or unit of learning, make constructive alignment visible with a statement of how it links to the relevant Learning Outcomes, and a set of learning objectives (module-level Learning Outcomes) for the module or group of modules that are derived from the Topic-level Learning Outcomes. Module level LOs break down the Topic-level LOs into learning activities and content within a particular module. These remind students of the reasons they are asked to absorb the content and complete activities, thus improving engagement and motivation.
One way to make activities more meaningful is to provide opportunities in them to collect evidence of progress against Learning Outcomes, and for students to display this evidence in an ePortfolio platform or format.