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L&S: Course Learning Outcomes (CLO) Expedited Project

Overview

The Provost’s Office has launched a multi-year initiative to collect and publish high-quality course learning outcomes (CLOs) for UW-Madison courses. CLOs are a critical part of course information; they communicate important information about courses, support student learning, and provide a framework for evaluating student understanding and progress.

The CLO initiative is already well underway:

• CLOs are now considered core components of courses, similar to titles, descriptions, and requisites.
• Our Lumen course proposal system has been digitally collecting and storing CLOs for 4 years; about a third of L&S courses have CLOs now in Lumen.
• Starting June 2024, collected CLOs will be published in Guide and potentially other places. (Until then, you can find them individually in Lumen Courses or en masse, filterable by subject, in this data viz.)

To move this initiative forward, the Provost’s Office is asking all departments to collect and submit CLOs for their undergraduate courses.  The Student Learning Assessment Office has created an expedited process and spreadsheet CLO collector that will allow departments to submit all of their CLOs at one time -- no course proposals or syllabi are required.

L&S Teaching & Learning Administration is working with L&S departments on a staggered timeline on this initiative, with a scheduled end date of December 2025.

Target courses for the CLO expedited initiative

When departments are ready to engage in this work, L&S will provide the department with a list of the the courses targeted for this initiative, which are courses that have all of the following characteristics:

• numbered under 700
• group instruction
• recently offered (within the last 4 years); and
• do not already have CLOs entered in Lumen Courses

Departments will have the option to submit CLOs for graduate, independent study courses or courses not recently taught (it is an option, but not required).

CLOs that have already been collected via Lumen Courses may not be modified via this process. Revisions to already submitted CLOs require course proposals.

Further guidance and information about the process

For more departmental-level information about this initiative, please see: Departmental-level advice for the CLO Expedited project

For advice about writing CLOs please see: Guidance for Writing Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs)