Goldilocks Learning Outcomes: Addressing Organizational Barriers and Relevance

This article describes the case of a team of scholar practitioners working to recognize student learning via a campus-wide co-curricular record project at a large, public, highly-decentralized university. The case was influenced by two key tensions at the university: an inconsistent usage of learning outcomes campus-wide and lack of experience with learning outcomes among individual educators. The team was committed to centering a learning outcomes paradigm for the co-curricular record to benefit students, unlock valuable institutional data, align with student affairs best practices, and promote a culture shift towards assessing co-curricular learning. When confronted with the required learning outcomes portion of the co-curricular record, stakeholders experienced a range of barriers to participation, bringing the project to a temporary halt. The team drew on organizational change and scholar practitioner approaches, to make strategic design, implementation, and training choices to address the learning outcomes barriers that stalled the project. By matching strategies to barriers the team created conditions that reactivated the co-curricular record project, made learning outcomes more usable and relevant for individuals and units, and contributed to a burgeoning campus-wide assessment culture. Though this case concerns a specific campus, the barriers, strategies, and benefits of using learning outcomes described here are applicable to readers with a range of roles and change priorities.