Practical Tips to Facilitate CO:PO Mapping and Documentation

Abstract

Constructive alignment is an approach commonly used to align teaching and learning activities to the stipulated course outcome(s) (COs). Nevertheless, many lecturers find it a daunting task to establish the linking between COs and programme outcome(s) (POs), for each lesson and assessment. In order to facilitate the proper alignment of teaching and learning activities to its respective COs and POs, firstly preset all the CO:PO mapping (based on approved CO:PO matrix) in the course outline as well as lesson plan and update them accordingly. Secondly, request all lecturers to assign the assessments and examination questions with the correct COs:POs. Lecturers involved in the course need to understand well the course content and its CO:PO measurements. Thirdly, for each type of assessment, allocate a table with predetermined COs:POs and scoring marks. Lecturers will then have to fill in the marks in the predesigned table format, which will facilitate the analysis of CO:PO measurements. Then an Excel spreadsheet with proper allocation of COs:POs need to be constructed to capture all assessment marks scored by students. The scores for each CO and PO can then be converted into an average percentage score. Finally, with the average percentage score of COs and POs, the lecturer can proceed with continuous quality improvement (CQI) where a comparison of scores from previous semester(s) can be made. This is to identify any potential drawbacks from the teaching and learning activities, where alternative solutions can be figured out to improve the delivery of the course. With the aforementioned steps, we have found that we were able to systematically measure and analyse COs:POs. The Excel spreadsheet not only serves as a crosscheck tool whilst filling but also allow us to continuously monitor and improve the quality of our course.