"I wanted a simulation; I wanted active learning. Today students want a multi-media, interactive experience; they don't want to be taught the way we were taught." Dr Joel Rudin
On Wednesday, May 11, we held a webinar together with guest speaker, Professor and Assistant Chair, Dr Joel Rudin from Rowan University. Hosted by Edumundo's own, Leon Lloyd, we discussed the importance of providing Assurance of Learning (AoL) in US Higher Education.
In this blog article, we provide a recap of the key highlights and insights presented and discussed during the webinar including examples of participants' questions at the end.
"'Assurance of learning' means different things in different contexts but above all it's a data-based process that demonstrates learning improvement."
Assurance of Learning, defined by Joel in the above quotation, is a term used across many accrediting agencies and forms a key criterion in how they accredit institutions.
Agencies such as AACSB want to see institutions' Assurance of Learning plans, what data they've obtained. and how they've used that data to demonstrate improvement. Joel explained one part of their accreditation process:
"Once every five years they send a team of three people, these are Deans of Business from other universities to review the evidence of learning acquisition in their school's programs."
The process emphasises the collection of data at the core of AoL and typically follows three steps which Joel outlined on his first slide:
"They don't expect perfection and 100% grades. They want to see proof of improvement. When you are proving improvement [in that particular subject] they then want you to focus on another subject to focus on improving that."
Proving Assurance of Learning is typically done via the collection of quantitative data over the course of a learning exercise. How and what data is collected requires some experimentation with various tests and formats.
"We teach in a variety of ways so why not assess in a way that's aligned to that style of teaching."
Joel explained that data to prove learning improvement has evolved throughout the years, starting initially with 'Nationally standardized tests' before moving on to 'multiple-choice tests in capstone courses' and then currently using a variety of different tests across the same variety of courses.
"About 20 years or so ago, there was a preference from agencies such as AACSB for institutions to use 'Nationally Standardized Tests' but there was some quality issues here. They were very expensive and not very effective. We then moved to a commonly used 'multiple-choice tests' for capstone courses. These are better because their faculty-driven, adapted to the particular courses students have studied previously. They are more tailored but the problem is they're harder to achieve improvement. We then moved on to a variety of different assessments: we teach in a variety of ways so why not assess in a way that's aligned to that style of teaching."
Once Joel's faculty had agreed upon the use of different tests tailored to individual courses, Joel began looking at ways in which business simulations could provide this 'loop', demonstrating improvement in students' learning and knowledge acquisition through quantitative data.
"The nice thing about business simulations for Assurance of Learning is that simulation providers keep a record of what happens during the exercise: not only who finished first and who finished last but what decisions they made. I can compare and contrast which teams made the optimal decision to improve their company [in the simulation]."
Joel explained two approaches through the use of simulations to prove learner improvement:
"They [Accrediting Agencies] want some successes but primarily they want to see measurable efforts to prove assurance of learning; they're not after perfection."
Used on Joel's MBA class 'Operations Analytics' the simulation was rolled out in-class across ten groups of students, taking part in a total of seven rounds of the simulation. Based on the weekly insight reports, provided Edumundo's Operations Team, Joel was able to identify after each week what the results were on the simulation's stock market and balanced scorecard.
After the simulation exercise, Joel collected a total of 70 results of which 57 (81%) showed an increase in stock market value with the remaining 13 (19%) showing a decrease in stock market value. This data is then used to prove Assurance of Learning during accreditation exercises and provides a benchmark for future simulation exercises to monitor improvement increases or decreases.
After the discussion on Assurance of Learning, the webinar culminated with a Q&A session where participants were able to ask questions to Joel and Leon. Here were a few examples of the questions asked:
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