Curriculum to Careers: Radical Collaboration in Assessment, Analytics, and Design

Streamed Session

Brief Abstract

Does your university experience obstacles and siloing in building and executing a strategy around connecting curriculum to careers?  Is this hindering your ability to drive transformative change in this area?

Join us we reflect on launching a university-wide initiative connecting curriculum to careers via instructional design, assessment, and data analytics.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Mary Elizabeth Smith, University of Phoenix- Main Campus

Mary Elizabeth's career in education spans twenty-five years. She transitioned an on-campus course to online in 1998 and has been either teaching online or working in online learning roles ever since. She possesses strong skills in the strategic development and implementation of educational services for diverse client base. She is especially interested in growth mindset, weaving non-cognitive skills throughout a curriculum, and skills-based education. She has keen sense of humor and not-so-great singing skills.

Co-presenter: Shelly Hodges, University of Phoenix - Main Campus

Co-presenter: Eve Krahe Billings, University of Phoenix - Main Campus

Extended Abstract

Does your university experience siloing across departments when it comes to building and executing a strategy around connecting curriculum to careers? Is it affecting your ability to innovate and drive transformative change in this area?  

Join us for a discussion around how we came together to leverage each other’s expertise in launching a massive university-wide initiative to map curriculum, tag in-demand skills in our assessments, re-frame instructional design practices to support this, and monitor progress using data.

This highly-matrixed undertaking sought to close the skills gap for students between higher ed and industry needs by mobilizing stakeholders across the university, including those outside the classroom.

Now standing at the finish line, we will detail what steps we took to successfully vision, design, and implement a skills-aligned curriculum framework focused on career identification and development across all academic programming at the University.

Three things set this groundbreaking initiative apart: its University-wide scope, the speed at which the framework was designed and implemented, and the tech ecosystem built to continually monitor and respond to trends in student learning outcomes and industry needs.

This session is structured as an interactive dialogue between participants and presenters around alignment of curriculum and careers. Foundational to the discussion will be the use of Storytelling to describe the narrative arc of our journey – our insights, our successes and our opportunities for improvement. We begin with a polling session to level-set audience members and understand where they are related to alignment of curriculum to careers and skills.  From there we will utilize the digital whiteboard, Jamboard, for real-time collaboration toward identifying ways to get started.