The Living Schoolbook

As I mentioned in previous posts, our initial use case for the "Goal Management" tool was to be able to create reusable, institution-wide metadata tags for learning objectives that faculty could use to describe the work they were assigning students in locally meaningful terms.  The school had developed its own ontology from its shared meaning of what they thought a Syracuse School of Education grad should be learning.  Broadly, this ontology of learning objectives stats that our grads should learn:

1. Critical reflection and explanation of practice
2. Content Knowledge
3. Inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy
4. Assessment of Student Learning
5. Professional conduct and collaboration

Probably every School of Education would come up with a similar list.  However, our list took at least a year to develop.  It was as long as 22 objectives, shrunk to 7 and now is 5 broad proficiencies each with 4 or 5  sub-proficiencies.  The list has changed and as the faculty and ideas change the list will change as well.  Its a living document that will change as faculty reflect on their practice, what is and isn't working, the curriculum and trends in education.  Any system meant to support this has to be able to change as well.  I can imagine a yearly deprecation of old sets of goals and publication of the new, slightly revised plan for the new year.  Looking back over time, an analyst could not only see the change in student performance but also see how the institution has evolved and changed.

I wonder what other types of metadata we might want to track in this manner.