Developing an Automated Course Alignment Tool: Part 1 the Alignment Process
Abstract: Course alignment is the action of bringing the learning objectives, activities and assessments of a course into agreement. Instructors can use course alignment to evaluate the effectiveness of their course’s instructional content and the assessment methods. Current alignment models are laborious and time consuming, require knowledge of the alignment model and a panel of experts to review documents and make judgments about the degree of alignment of the course. In this brief paper, we describe an ongoing project to develop an automated alignment tool, to be used by a course instructor as part of course design, to evaluate the alignment of a course. We describe the first step in the development of the tool, defining an alignment process and the challenges that arose during use. Participants will learn a method of alignment they can apply in their courses.