 Learning Outcomes play a foundational role in the course design process. They describe to both instructors, to learners and the academic community what a learner should know and be able to do by the end of the course. Learning outcome, as you know, there's a fair amount of controversy around the very topic. But for me, I find it's a good guide. Basically, it points to a direction as to where you want to take your learning and your teaching. It helps in terms of developing more specific objectives, and also helps check that your assessment actually coincides with what you're trying to teach. Outcomes-based education is interesting in terms of higher education in Ontario because it's not new to education. Before I did my PhD, I did a certificate to teach English in the second language and a Bachelor of Education. And we always talked about our outcomes. We had carefully developed outcomes for language learners in any classroom. And so when I got to higher education, it was second nature to me to use outcomes. Now, when I looked at the research literature, it reinforced all the things I'd learned in my previous education. Very learner-centered. That's the first thing that we know about outcomes-based education. So even those people who use them in the sense of they knew ahead of time what they wanted students to be able to do and they assess those things at the end, one of the most recent emphasis is that it makes it more transparent. So that students know what it is you expect from them right from the goal. It's a really good way to communicate with students what the expectations are of a course, but it's also a really good way to let them know that they have an active role to play in a course. That as learners, they're not going to be passive. That there are these outcomes that they are responsible for achieving. It's a way of saying to students, I've put a lot of thought into a course and I've thought about the kinds of things you're going to get out of this course and so if you do the kinds of activities that I've designed, you stay on top of the work, this is what you will get out of it. For me at least, it helps me talk to other people in my department so that we're reducing redundancies and overlaps and maximizing progression and connectivity. So I just think it makes for better, well, as a curriculum person, it makes for better linking and laddering. So you can link horizontally and ladder vertically if you've got outcomes in terms of overarching curricular outcomes. Outcomes based education ties learning outcomes to the assessment or ties I should say the other way around, ties assessment to the learning outcomes. So you're assessing to determine whether or not the outcomes that were articulated at the beginning of the course of study, the program of study, have been achieved. And so it's very clear not only for the student, but for the teacher as well and for other stakeholders in the education system, for example, the public, parents, government, employers, all these people are able to say without a doubt, yes, the outcomes have been achieved or no, the outcomes have not been achieved. Therefore learning has or has not taken place. Learning outcomes have been useful, mainly because I'm a statistician, not a computer scientist, so when I'm teaching courses in computer science they're quite beneficial for me to know what's expected of the students by the time the course is complete. So it does help me structure the course, helps me understand what things I may necessarily have to do to get the students from where they are to where they need to be. You know, one of the things I think is really great about us focusing on learning outcomes is that it highlights a whole second side of the teaching profession. And what I mean by that is I study memory and in human memory, one of the first things we always tell everybody when we're talking about human memory is that there is no single thing called human memory. There's multiple memory systems for different things we do. One system for information, holding information, but for example a very different system for learning to play basketball or karate or guitar. Anything that involves skills and repetitive behavior we learn that in a different way. An example I like to give is you can learn a lot about karate in an hour seminar but you can't learn to do karate in an hour seminar. You have to do that by successive repeated practice. The learning outcomes framework highlights that when we're in the classroom yes we want to teach content, knowledge, information, that's there. They can get that from the class, they can get that from the book but we also want to teach all these skills, critical thinking, creative thinking, self-reflective thought, communication. Those we have to teach differently. We have to come up with ways of giving students structured repeated practice with those skills. And I think by kind of highlighting those as being, you know, there's like five of them for the one content kind of thing, we're finally getting some balance. When I'm working with an instructor who wants to look at a redesign of a course to make it into a blended course or even if they're starting from scratch creating a blended course learning outcomes is probably the place that I would start because in terms of the overall philosophy of our center around course design we feel that having very articulate, well-defined learning outcomes for the students is really key and guides the instructor in that they kind of come to the realization of what is truly important for their students in the course. And so I think that process can help them make better selection of course content and topics that they want to cover in the course. Well, learning outcomes are an interesting topic because they've only become a popular topic very recently and yet we've been teaching for forever. So how did we ever manage successful learning before we got to the point of deliberately articulating our learning outcomes? That's an interesting question for another day, but what I've found is that now that we are focusing on learning outcomes what those allow for is actually deliberate building of your course activities, your learning opportunities, your assessments. And even the objectives themselves, you really have to take a moment to decide exactly what is it that you want students to have achieved to be able to demonstrate at the end of the course.