Rigor in Unity DE Courses
Overview of Concepts
Unity DE’s coursework is created through the backwards design process and the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework to ensure that successful students have met the designated course outcomes, which are measurable skills and competencies. The same backward design process ensures competency in the Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) for students who successfully complete their areas of study.
The purpose of this document is to function as a parallel structure of definitions and standards to help the Learning Experience Design Unit scope and maintain appropriate standards for our Undergraduate and Graduate courses and programs. These standards can be applied irrespective of the course / program outcomes to help us evaluate whether a course is sufficiently rigorous for a given level of academia. The fundamental goal is to define these standards internally, as values. It may be preferable to use more quantifiable indicators - such as grade distributions, failure / success rates, and job placement success - to set these standards; however, we will still maintain the following fundamental assumptions:
Our courses are not arbitrary hoops through which everyone should be expected to proceed without difficulty in order to graduate and “enter the real world.” Therefore, we cannot ignore the rigor of our courses and seek simply to “lower the bar” such that as many students are successful as possible. Conversely, failure rates can never be a measure of our courses’ “rigor” as it is our explicit goal to design courses so that as many students can succeed as possible, and it is our philosophy that a course’s success can never be defined by explicitly exclusionary tactics. Finally, alumni success (job placement, etc.) may trump any values we set internally to establish and maintain rigor, but that data will always lag several years behind the actual design and development of the programs were trying to assess. The values laid out in this document serve as a more timely evaluative measure.
Rigor refers, in part, to the ability to think, converse, and engage in a discipline, with a particular knowledge. Furthermore, students are expected to function with increasing autonomy as they build subject matter knowledge and assemble a discipline-specific toolkit. A Unity DE degree of any level, graduate or baccalaureate, engages students in a professionalization process such that they are prepared to work in their field of study upon (or during) completion of their degree.