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Course Outcomes - Where to find them and where to put them

Official course outcomes exist for every credit-earning course and are developed, vetted, approved, and published through a formal process. Outcomes for one course often dovetail into a successive course. For courses that transfer or lead-in to university programs, the outcomes guide instructors in how to prepare students for continued success in their academic careers.

Where to Find Official MHCC Course Outcomes

Course outcomes can be found in Courseleaf Course Information Management which integrates with MHCC's Online Catalog.

  1. Follow this link to log in to the Instructional Services, Catalog-Curriculum .
  2. Use your Intranet username and password, what you use to log into OneDrive.
  3. Click on the first link, Course Inventory Management
  4. Use the search window to find your course using the course code, title or keyword. TIP: Use " " if the search criteria aren't complete, e.g. "writing"
  5. Scroll down to view the course description, outcomes, and student objectives.
  6. Export the information to a PDF or MS Word file

Where to Include Official Course Outcomes in Your Online Course

There are two likely places to include your course outcomes.

Syllabus

  1. Include the complete list of official course outcomes either linked to or within the syllabus.
  2. For Blackboard courses, Online Learning provides a file called Overview in the Syllabus Section. The Overview file includes a place for the outcomes.
  3. Alternately, you can include your outcomes in the Syllabus file itself.

Lesson Files

  1. The course files provided by Online Learning for Blackboard courses include Lesson Activity files for each lesson.
  2. These Lesson Activity files begin with an Overview section that is related to the respective lesson.
  3. This Overview section includes a place to put the course outcomes that are relevant to that lesson.

To summarize, include the full list of official course outcomes in your Syllabus. Include only the relevant course outcomes for each lesson in the Lesson Activity files.

Use Official Course Outcomes, not Textbook Objectives

Remember, publishers do not prepare their materials specifically for any given school or course. So while publishers often include "outcomes" or "learning objectives" at the start of chapters or in other publisher-provided materials (such as PowerPoint presentations), these are not always aligned with MHCC official course outcomes and should not be used as guiding outcomes or the basis for assessments. If you do see value in posting the publisher's objectives, a good practice would be to nest those enabling objectives beneath the official MHCC course outcomes so that it is clear how the publisher's objectives support MHCC course outcomes. See an example below:

Example:

Lesson Outcome from MHCC Course Outline:

Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to...
  1. Apply the scientific method to hypotheses by performing experiments and using the resulting data to form a conclusion

Lesson Outcome and Publisher Enabling Objectives presented together in Lesson Activity overview:

In this lesson, you will learn about the scientific method and its role in performing experiments.
Course Outcomes
  1. Apply the scientific method to hypotheses by performing experiments and using the resulting data to form a conclusion
Objectives that Support Course Outcomes
  • Learners will be able to list the steps of the scientific method
  • Learners will be able to define a hypothesis
  • Learners will be able to explain the role of a hypothesis in the scientific method

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