UoB’s UTEL organizes a workshop “Developing Intended Learning Outcomes and Key Performance Indicators”

As part of its initiatives towards the continuous professional development of affiliates of different educational institutions in the Kingdom, the Teaching Excellence and Leadership unit (UTEL) at the University of Bahrain organized an online workshop entitled “‘Developing Intended Learning Outcomes and Key Performance Indicators’ on Tuesday, February 23. The workshop was open to the public and was attended by more than 120 participants representing faculty in higher education, curriculum committee members, quality assurance directors, and curriculum and course syllabus developers in schools and universities.

According to Dr. Diana Abdulkarim Aljahromi, the Unit’s Director, the workshop’s primary objectives were to outline the principles of maintaining the quality of education through the development of intended learning outcomes that are assessable, result-oriented, constructively aligned with the learning activities and assessment, and affiliated with the national and international quality assurance systems and qualification frameworks. Dr. Diana also mentioned that the development and optimization of measurable key performance indicators help educators make informed decisions regarding course design and assessment.

The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Masooma Ali Al-Mutawah, the Coordinator of the Continuous Professional Development Program offered at the Unit for Teaching Excellence and Leadership and a Fellow of HEA in the UK. Dr. Al-Mutawah, who is also the Head of the Initial Teacher Education Department in Bahrain Teacher College, emphasized the importance of focusing on educational outcomes that make the student the focus of the educational process.

During the workshop, Dr. Al-Mutawah stated that “The learning outcomes must clarify what the student should know, understand and be able to do at the end of the semester. The outcomes are the students’ achievements and not the teacher’s intentions, it is what the students learned not what the teacher taught”. “The outcomes must be measurable and evaluable and should be aligned with levels of the National Qualifications Framework. Assessing outcomes means assessing the learning while assessing objectives means assessing the teaching.

Dr. Al-Mutawah pointed out the importance of developing effective intended learning outcomes, and how to create measurable key performance indicators for them to measure them through assessments. She explained how to properly write course and program outcomes using correct verbs from Bloom’s taxonomy. She also mentioned other hierarchical models of affective and the psychomotor learning objectives, the University’s intended learning outcomes UILOs, and the essential key information faculty should follow to write appropriate course descriptions.

Dr. Aljahromi, the Director of the UTEL, stressed that this workshop is part of the University‘s sustainable strategy to serve the local educational community, which the UTEL considers as part of its mission and plans to provide more workshops to the educational sector as a reflection of its societal partnership.