Elaine Soetaert, Coordinator
Technology and Curriculum Innovation
The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 

Presentation by:
Jeff Zabudsky, Dean
Technology and Curriculum Innovation
The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Introduction

Among all organizations in the tertiary education sector, technical institutions face unique challenges as they strive to fulfill their traditional roles in an increasingly global economy that is being transformed by technological innovation. Technical institutes have always been expected to provide job-ready graduates to industry by ensuring graduate proficiency in a list of entry-level competencies. However, two critical factors in today’s economy are rendering traditional practices obsolete. The first critical factor is the pace of change that today’s technical institute confronts. Technological innovation in industry is taxing the technical institute’s capacity to respond with relevant curriculum. The process of curriculum development and redesign is often left to individual instructors who admirably endeavor to teach, maintain currency in their disciplinary fields and redevelop curriculum.

The second critical factor that is forcing change in traditional practice relates to the learning needs of today’s student. Whereas the industry specific skills-development approach to teaching and learning has served institutes well and will continue to form a large part of institutional culture, students today (including students of technical institutes) need to be prepared for an economy that will demand their continuing development. The reality is that no institution can expect to fully prepare students for today’s workplace. For this reason, technical institutes need to teach not only the skills of a trade, they need to ensure students have developed skills that will allow them to succeed as lifelong learners. This paper describes the response of The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology to the challenges described above.

The Digital Curriculum Database and The Challenge of Industry-Relevant Learning at NAIT

The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) is a technical institute in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada that yearly serves 7,500 full-time program students, 7,000 apprenticeship students, and 40,000 continuing education students. In total, more than 50,000 learners come in contact with NAIT each year.

To date, NAIT has a successful track record of responding quickly and comprehensively to industry needs. It has been able to do this by maintaining close contact with accreditation bodies, through the establishment of a rich industry advisory network, and by means of a competency profile development (CPD) process (similar to a DACUM) that is built on validation by industry. The competency profile development system has served NAIT well over the years and, as a testament to its quality, has been sold to other technical institutions around the world. However, while the competency development and validation processes are demonstrably successful, the process of introducing those competencies into the curriculum has become increasingly challenging. A systematic and routine process for ensuring both the regularity of the CPD process as well as the transfer of CPD recommendations into the curriculum design process has not been fully realized.

The LOGging Our Curriculum Project

The need to normalize the process of curriculum renewal in the face of variable industry dynamics has given rise to the establishment of an institutional curriculum database. The digital curriculum database is the technological underpinnings of a strategic institutional initiative to transform all NAIT curricula into outcomes-based modules. The project is called LOGging Our Curriculum and the first step has involved a course by course identification of learning outcomes for all courses at NAIT. The outcome statements have been fashioned in a consistent institutional format incorporating an accepted list of verbs that can be classified according to Bloom’s taxonomy. The marriage of this classification scheme with database technology means that instructors can use technology to better identify the various levels and domains of knowledge that are contained within their curriculum as per Bloom’s classification system. A subsequent section will describe how the database of learning outcomes is tied to a more comprehensive curriculum development methodology. However, it is worthwhile here to consider the institutional implications of an accurate, real-time record of all NAIT learning outcomes and a consequent shared curriculum resource.

Industry Relevant Curriculum

As noted above, a continuing challenge for NAIT instructors has been the need to incorporate regular competency profile development recommendations into their curriculum. This is no small task for instructors given that they carry full teaching loads and are dedicated teachers who commit to spending additional time assisting students in many ways throughout the course of a year. The LOGging Our Curriculum initiative offers an opportunity to update the CPD process in order to normalize the function of curriculum validation and renewal in the context of an instructor’s regular work. The process will allow programs to generate a survey drawn from the curriculum database that will be distributed to industry. The results of that survey will inform further curriculum development. Because the curriculum is entirely built upon individual outcomes, the consequent granularity will allow instructors to reconstruct courses without complete course overhauls.

Sharing Curriculum

Another advantage of the curriculum database is the opportunity that instructors will have to share curriculum across the institution. It is well known that all programs teach to many of the same learning outcomes. For example, learning outcomes associated with basic computer skills, team building, conflict management and Ohm’s Law are just a few of the learning outcomes that are critical to student success in many programs at NAIT. However, curricula to support these outcomes have traditionally been developed in isolation, program by program. As a shared resource available to all, the curriculum database will allow instructors to both submit their ideas and draw on the curriculum development expertise of their colleagues across the institution. The curriculum model that has been developed is sufficiently flexible to allow instructors to draw on a consistent curriculum framework while at the same time allowing them to bring to bear their own personal teaching artistry.

Finally, the curriculum database will provide an invaluable resource for the business development unit of NAIT to design customized training for a myriad of industry clients. A large and increasing portion of NAIT’s revenue comes through providing continuing education services to industry clients who demand a more customized and focussed approach to training. NAIT’s outcomes-based format is ideally suited to designing a curriculum that can be quickly and effectively delivered in keeping with the just in time demands of many industry clients.

The Digital Curriculum Database: The Challenge of Changing Learner Needs and Expectations at NAIT

Systematic Instructional Design

It is important to make clear that the curriculum database is not simply a means to ensure a valid series of learning outcomes is assembled to meet the demands of industry. While the needs of industry are important to all decisions that are made in regards to curriculum at NAIT, students remain NAIT’s primary customers and it is the needs of students that provide the momentum behind LOGging Our Curriculum. Because students remain at the forefront of academic decision making, NAIT is committed to ensuring a pedagogically sound curriculum design and delivery model is utilized across the institution. The LOGging Our Curriculum project prescribes an institute-wide approach to instructional design that is proven successful and particularly apt in a technical institute setting. Kolb’s experiential learning model forms the foundation for NAIT’s institutional standard and befits an organization with a hands-on, activity-oriented approach to learning. The incorporation of the experiential learning model into the database design ensures that NAIT’s curriculum includes hands-on, practical components.

Empowering Learners

Preparing students for success in the workplace must go beyond ensuring they have mastered industry specific skill-sets. Graduates into today’s workplace need to be flexible, critically analytical thinkers in order to master ongoing changes in today’s world. We know that today’s graduates will work in multiple careers and settings throughout their lives and NAIT is eager to provide these students with the skills necessary to succeed in such environments -- skills such as self-inquiry and learning autonomy. LOGging Our Curriculum puts well-developed Learning Outcome Guides (LOGs) into the hands of students. These empowering tools will each provide a clearly articulated learning outcome, a rationale, pre and post tests, enabling objectives and a description of learning activities that students will engage in to meet each objective.

LOGging Our Curriculum: A Vision for the Future

LOGging Our Curriculum is a project that will position NAIT for the future of learning. In the new millenium, students will arrive at NAIT’s doors with considerably different needs and expectations. From their primary school days onward, students will be increasingly exposed to technologies such as the Internet that facilitate independent learning and self-inquiry. These will be confident and technologically literate individuals who will demand learning that meets their personal requirements. LOGging Our Curriculum is just the first step in a process that will offer more on-demand learning for students. For this reason, other institutional measures will be required such as better access to network resources, greater accessibility through electronic and face-to-face means to instructional staff, and greater acknowledgement of past learning through the implementation of systematic approaches to prior learning assessment and recognition.

Many of these changes are anathema to the culture of academic environments. However, the revolution in learning has already begun. One need only look at the proliferation of online distance education programs throughout the world to understand that innovation in academic environments is upon us. Technical institutes face a particularly difficult challenge as they find themselves most directly affected by the revolution going on in industry. However, by responding quickly to those global economic forces, technical institutions are positioned to be the leaders in learning innovation. 

References

Bloom, B.S. (1984). Taxonomy of educational objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive domain. Addison Wesley Longman.

Grondlund, Norman E. (2000). How to write and use instructional objectives. 6th Edition, Prentice Hall.

Kolb, David A.(1983). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

McCarthy, Bernice. (1987,1981). The 4MAT system: Teaching to learning styles with right/left mode techniques. Barrington, IL: Excel, Inc.

NAIT Program Planning and Development Guidelines. (1998). NAIT becoming a master instructor program - Module 2. Edmonton: The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

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