Just over two years ago, BYU was ramping up for an accreditation visit by The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. One of the institutional requirements we faced was documenting the learning outcomes for all of our 400+ degree programs on campus. We needed to do so in a way that allowed for broad faculty participation in the authoring and maintenance of the documentation and that allowed for feedback from the student body and the broader University community (alumni, parents, other interested parties).

With various options on the table, we settled on MediaWiki. With a bit of customization, we integrated the software with our LDAP directory so that we could authorize faculty authors across campus–447 in total. (For reasons you can probably understand, we decided against letting students edit their degree program requirements at this juncture.) These authors have made over 12,000 edits to the learning outcomes documentation for BYU’s degree programs. We also added a simple feedback form to the wiki allowing any visitor to submit feedback to the program coordinators. To date, over a thousand feedback submissions have been submitted. However, this is a small percentage of the feedback based on student reaction to the information available on the wiki as it has been the topic of discussion in college forums with administrators and students, college surveys, in-class discussions, and end-of-semester surveys. The wiki is also regularly referenced in course syllabi across campus.

Long after the NWCCU campus visit, BYU’s Learning Outcomes Wiki is alive and well and an integral part of the teaching an learning ecosystem on campus. 

It’s been over a month since I’ve blogged. At first my blog-silence was due to being busy with other things–wrapping up the semester, getting ready for the holidays, etc. Then I decided to take some time off, unstring the bow, so to speak.

Now as I get back into the swing of things, I realize I need to blog again. I jumped in to this blog last year thinking it would be a great way to share ideas and get feedback on things I was working on or thinking about. And it has been. But over the last month I’ve realized there’s another hugely important benefit of blogging. Keeping a blog has been a great way to organize my own thoughts, to force myself through the methodical process of making points more clear than when they’re just bouncing around in my head. And I’ve missed it.

So, whether anyone else has missed my musings or not, I’m returning to my regular routine of blogging at least once a week because it helps me sort through all of the chaff and make better sense of the complicated world I confront every day. And if I offer an insight or two along the way that helps you do the same, all the better.

And I’ve (re)learned an important lesson about the value of metacognition in the learning process . . .