This document discusses teaching and learning goals, methods, and outcomes. It questions traditional approaches that focus solely on knowledge transfer and completion goals, suggesting alternative goals like personal growth, creative thinking, humility and helping others. It critiques measuring success by adherence to rules alone and advocates allowing for deviation. It argues that how we design learning - what we measure and the rules we set - impacts who can succeed and perpetuates existing power structures. It calls for rethinking syllabi, pedagogy and definitions of success to focus less on completion and more on curiosity, pace and path personalization, and getting learning design right to be inclusive of all.

2. Which one of the following 5 is least like the
others?
Cow, tiger, snake, bear, dog

3. Assessment
What are our goals, actually?
Jess Mitchell
Sr. Mgr. Research + Design
@jesshmitchell
jmitchell@ocadu.ca

4. Why do you teach?

5. Why do you teach?
•Are you hoping to transfer knowledge
•To build skills
•To transfer a bunch of facts
•To help people think
•To help people become more ethical, accountable
•To help people learn how to learn – and expect they
will do this evermore
•To continue learning yourself

6. Who are we teaching?

7. When we teach, do we aim
to do no harm?

8. When we teach, do we
design inclusively?

9. You’re a designer
Yes
Do you make
decisions?

10. Nothing is neutral

11. We all are Designers
of this world
we are all part of the revolution
…or else the status quo

12. What is your tolerance for the
FALSE POSITIVE?

13. Are you more concerned with Billy
than you are with the
FALSE NEGATIVE?

14. If we cannot have a perfect
predictor, what is the error rate
that we will tolerate?

15. Who is accountable?
Who is responsible?
Where does the buck stop?
What is YOUR moral responsibility?

16. power asymmetries
racial dynamics
mental health considerations
and other challenges

18. When do we apply ethics?

19. What you measure is
what you value
# of logins
Time of submission
“success” / absence of failure
Completion
“diversity”

21. how you measure it is your bias
What you do with it is your
‘design decision’

23. Would we recognize learning
if we saw it?

24. Be creative
Try, Fail, Learn from it?
Practice critical thought?
Learn how to work with others?
Learn how to productively critique

26. Control
We like structure.
We often fall back on it when
we’re most unsure.

27. Conundrum
Rubrics tell us: Adherence to
the rule is success; deviation
from the rule is failure.

28. Structure

29. Regurgitated
Structure

30. Structured Structure-lessness

31. BASELINE GOALS WEEK 1
Why are you here?
Is there a specific thing you expect to learn, practice, know at the
end of this class?
How will you measure success?
What are your learning goals?
How do you propose to do this?
What support do you need?
What evidence will you provide that you have achieved your goals.
How will you tackle mistakes and failures
How is online learning different?
• What are 5 things that are better?
• What are 5 things that are worse?
What is one thing about you that I should know that I can’t tell by
seeing you online?
If you are comfortable, please share a photo so I can learn your
name faster.

32. REFLECTION BOOK DUE EACH WEEK (12 TOTAL)
Each week that we have class please reflect on
the following questions:
What stood out for you today in class, what
stuck?
What questions remain?
What are 3 ‘exam’ questions you would create
from the materials and the class?
How can I improve your learning in the class?
How can you improve your learning in the class?
What is new vocabulary from this weeks’
experiences, readings, discussions?

34. Deviation is Failure
Many syllabi are the rules by
which we measure success or
failure. Adherence to the rule
is success; deviation from
the rule is failure.

35. The Potential Harm We Cause
with the Game
Achieve Opportunities Career/Success

36. There really is no substitute for experience
…except privilege

37. The Game
Achieve Career/Success
Opportunities
Socio-economic status, postal
code, immigration status,
vocabulary of your parents,
money, time, race

38. do you measure?
Personal growth Trying something new
Confidence
Stepping outside of
comfort
Creative connections Humility
Applying concepts Judgement
Helping another student Ah-ha moments

39. Whose rules?
Adherence to the rule is
success; deviation from the
rule is failure.
We measure what we value.
Who is deciding what to
measure?

40. Who do the rules limit?
We all are limited by rules
No exceptions
You must report on your department’s success using these
measures
Only English speakers can learn from this material
Only graduate students can take this course
Your thoughts must be organized in a 5 paragraph essay
You cannot use Wikipedia as a reference

41. Failure
Adherence to the rule is success; deviation
from the rule is failure.
With this:
We fail to go anywhere.
We often fall back on the way it has always been
Ccomfortable ruts of thinking and doing
We are perpetuating the status quo

42. how we design matters;
and every decision is a
design decision

43. What if adherence to the rules
is failure and
deviation is success?!
What failure should
be:
adherence to a rule
knowing without
thinking
(memorization)

44. What is Failure then?
Adherence to
too much
structure

45. What is Success then?
Just enough
structure
Personal control

46. Re-Think
Syllabus
Pedagogy
Individual goals and
definitions of success

47. The contract
The syllabus

48. What has COVID taught
us?

49. beware the binary
beware certainty
beware completion
beware idolatry

50. how we design matters;
and every decision is a
design decision

51. • Pace, Path, Content, Delivery Method
• text, visual, sonification, video…
• individual, group, didactic, participatory
• Motivation – external, internal, positive, nega
• Social support – peer, instructor, other
• Degree of structure

52. H o w C a n I d o
t h i s ?
• think about the edge | outliers and
wonder how you impacted them
• can you let the student decide –
personalize and humanize education
• think about design decisions —
brilliant or exclusionary
• Worry about getting it wrong

53. Aim for
Curiosity:
not Solving

54. Alfie Kohn
wisdom

55. Your work
begins now
...and it never ends...

57. IQ: Which one of the following 5 is least like the
others?
Cow, tiger, snake, bear, dog

58. @jesshmitchell