Speaker 1: In this video we're going to discuss alignment and the importance of alignment. There's always three areas you want to consider when you're talking about alignment. The first is learning outcomes, then there's instructional strategies, and then there's assessments. When these three do not align you have what's called misalignment and you want to avoid that. I commonly see this when instructors go ahead and find an amazing resource. They think it's great, it's cool, and they throw it in their course. The problem is it doesn't align to a learning outcome or the assessment. This becomes a problem because although it's really interesting, students might like it, all you're doing is creating additional work for your learners versus focusing on instructional strategies that will help support those learning outcomes. So you always want to make sure your learning outcomes, your instructional strategies, and your assessments are aligned. So you're supporting the learner as they're learning the material in the course that has been set by the learning outcomes. So how do you start with alignment? First you want to consider your learning outcomes. This should be the first thing you do is write your learning outcomes when you're designing a course. And using the Bloom's taxonomy framework, you want to consider the action verb. So what do you want the learners to do? Are they remembering something? Are they demonstrating understanding of the facts? Are they applying knowledge to a new situation? Are they making connections among ideas? Are they justifying a standard decision? Or are they creating something new? When you're considering this, although you have the content you want them to know, so you want to make sure that you understand that there is a difference between these because if let's say you have them design a model of a solar system, then on an assessment you have them define what a solar system is, they're not meeting that learning outcome because they're not designing the solar system as you had in your learning outcome. So you want to make sure those align. So after you create your action verbs and your content, you put them together for your learning outcomes, then you want to ask yourself is your course aligned? So you have your learning outcomes. Do you have instructional strategies that help support those learning outcomes? What is in your course should help the learner master those learning outcomes so that when you create your assessments, the learners can show you that they've mastered those learning outcomes. Additionally, when you're talking about course alignment and you're talking about assessments, make sure that action verb matches with what you have the learners complete. For example, if you have them create a model of a plane, well then they should be creating a model of a plane. They shouldn't be defining the parts of a plane in a multiple choice test. In fact, a multiple choice test would not be appropriate because they won't be able to actually design or create if you're looking at higher order thinking. Also, you want to make sure your instructional strategies align with your assessments. So let's look at some examples. Let's say your learning outcome is writing research paper and as one of your instructional activities, you have them identifying the parts of your research paper. So the learners need to know about the parts of your research paper so that they're able to write a research paper. So maybe that's one of your instructional activities. Then for the assessment, after they've gone through every single instructional activity, you have them taking multiple choice tests where learners answer questions on the parts of a research paper. Although they can answer these questions about the parts of a research paper, you do not have them writing a research paper. So you don't know if they're able to write a research paper. So this is called misaligned. Let's say that your learning outcome is to determine the answer to an addition problem. And for the instructional activity, you have the learners practicing answering addition problems. And then for the assessment, you have a multiple choice test where students answer addition problems. We want to ask yourself, does the instructional activity and does the assessment align to the learning outcome? So for the instructional activity, they're practicing answering addition problems. So they're getting that practice in. Where assessment, they have to determine the answer to those addition problems. So this would be misaligned.