By Katie Stobbart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 14, 2015
So, what are ILOs? Essentially, they are nine goals the university has set for you, called Institutional Learning Outcomes. Despite the expectation students will meet said goals, I have a feeling most of us couldn’t name one off the top of our heads. However, it’s not a hard guessing game, since UFV’s ILOs are about as vaguely applicable as horoscopes, and I imagine measuring the success or failure of students to meet them is a bit like astrology.
In short, they’re a collection of empty buzzwords.
I remember being instructed in middle or high school on how to set “SMART” goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. While I’ve never liked having The Way It Must Be Done fed to me with a spoonful of clever acronyms, I guess my SMART goals have seen better results than my stupid ones.
That said, catchy slogans and easy-to-regurgitate acronyms usually act as a kite string for something that desperately needs anchorage: that is, something insubstantial and flighty.
UFV’s ILOs are as follows:
•Demonstrate information competency
• Analyze critically and imaginatively
•Use skills and knowledge proficiently
•Initiate inquiries and develop solutions to problems
•Communicate effectively
•Pursue self-motivated and self-reflected learning
•Engage in collaborative leadership
•Engage in respectful and professional practices
•Contribute regionally and globally
Each is paired with an equally vague paragraph or so clarifying what graduates should do to meet these outcomes. To be fair, they sound nice; they’re the kinds of qualities that could at least sort of apply to most graduates of any university. But that’s also the problem.
If we’re thinking in terms of SMART goals, these aren’t specific, they’re not really measurable, they might be achievable, they are relevant since they all address learning in some way, and they’re bound to the amount of time each graduate takes to finish his or her program. Finally, they can all be summed up in about five words: Acquire and use knowledge effectively.
Coming up with a short-slogan kite string instead of a nine-commandments kite rope might have saved the university some time. But the ILOs have caught on, and they’re being used as the foundation for other empty initiatives. Back in April 2013 for example, Jody Gordon told The Cascade about the benefits of the then fairly recent ILOs when it came to the new co-curricular record (CCR) project.
“A lot of schools that launch [the] co-curricular [record] spend a year and a half just developing learning outcomes,” she said, noting that UFV was a step ahead by already having ILOs in place (“Co-curricular record coming to UFV this spring,” April 3, 2013).
I don’t know what kind of price tag a year and a half of development carries, but I don’t imagine it’s cheap, and we’ve essentially paid for busywork: a lot of time and energy and resources spent to say very little of actual value.
It’s not that prescribed learning outcomes can’t be useful. In the public school system, for example, where a number of schools are required to deliver the same standard, learning outcomes serve as a set of criteria ensuring everyone knows what they’re supposed to impart. But the template doesn’t translate well into the context of a university. Rather than many places trying to deliver one standard outcome, we have one place trying to offer varied outcomes. The learning outcomes at a university should be as varied as the number of programs it offers; in fact, one could argue they should vary by its number of students, since we all have individual goals and aim to acquire different sets of skills and knowledge from our post-secondary experiences.
Most of UFV’s ILOs seem like no-brainers: “use knowledge and skills proficiently,” and “communicate effectively.” If that needs to be said, we’ve got a big problem: if not that, what are we doing here?
Hopefully students are going to come to UFV and learn, then leave and use what they’ve learned in some productive way. But there’s already a perfectly good label for that: “university.”
