Students' roles

Faculty members and curriculum specialists cannot and should not be solely responsible for evaluating curricular health. Students themselves need to be full partners in the assessment of their progress toward meeting goals and outcomes. After all, the students are the ones doing the learning. They don’t always follow the same paths to the finish line. Along the way, they take certain electives and they are often the ones who can best document how they have achieved milestones. If they are treated as partners in these curriculum evaluation efforts, they may in fact become more intentional about their learning as well.

Consider the possibilities of an ongoing portfolio for each student (e-portfolio solutions are probably most useful in this regard): as the students progress, they gather evidence from their various courses of how their work contributes to program outcomes (or pieces thereof). By the end of the degree, they can point directly to this evidence in a framework that makes sense to them and to anyone who needs to see it (accreditation teams or potential employers).