How many course level outcomes should a course have?

As a division chair I was asked by faculty how many course level outcomes was the right number of course level student learning outcomes for a course outline. As a member of curriculum committee twenty years ago the question sometimes arose of whether an outline had too few or too many outcomes. If there is wisdom in collective decisions made over the years, then the outlines should now be able to help inform answers to these questions. 

Based on student learning outcomes listed on the college web site, the college has 319 courses with 1648 course level student learning outcomes. The average number of outcomes per course is 5.2 with a most frequently occurring value of four outcomes per course. Four courses have only a single course level learning outcome, one course has 15. The chart suggests recommending three to no more than seven course learning outcomes.
A course with four course learning outcomes mapping to four general education program learning outcomes. Diagram shows how a single assignment and a single course can still report to multiple program and institutional learning outcomes, even with one-to-one mapping in place.

Given that avoiding grey goo effectively requires a one-to-one mapping of each course learning outcome to a program learning outcome, one can look at the number of program learning outcomes in a program to determine, at a minimum, how many courses might be needed to serve those program outcomes. 

Based only an analysis of the catalog, 33 programs deliver a total of 192 program student learning outcomes for an average of 5.8 program learning outcomes per program. Most programs have three to seven program learning outcomes. Thus at an extreme minimum two to four courses could numerically cover the number of outcomes in a program. Of course no program is designed based on a numbers, but this suggests that the curriculum can be assessed even after moving to a one-to-one mapping of course to program learning outcomes.

The high outlier with 16 program learning outcomes is the general education program. This provides a sense of the assessment size or assessment footprint of the general education program and provides support for having a general education program coordinator.

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