As our college has been gearing up for its accreditation site visit, which happens next week, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about our seven Core Learning Outcomes (CLOs). Naturally, they play a fairly large role in the self-evaluation report that we’re submitting to the accreditors, so that’s one reason they’ve been on my mind. But I’ve also been thinking about connections among those college-wide outcomes, and how those connections inform in various ways EvCC’s ongoing Guided Pathways work.
Noodling about on that topic recently, I found myself wanting to visualize how many CLO connections there actually among the courses we offer. In particular, I wondered whether there might be certain clusters of courses that all support the same CLOs, even if the courses themselves are part of different departments, programs, or degree/certificate pathways. Here’s the visualization I came up with:
To get a sense of how courses in different divisions are connected to one another via shared CLOs, click on the name of a division you’re interested in. This will highlight all courses within that division. You can also click and drag any of the nodes representing an individual CLO; this will lock in place wherever you release it, which can make it a bit easier to see which courses are clustered around specific outcomes. Hover your cursor over an individual course to reveal the specific CLOs it introduces. (A larger view is also available.)
Do you see any interesting patterns in the network? Are there any groupings of courses you might not expect? How might visualizations like this help us see new connections or patterns that could help us approach our Guided Pathways efforts–particularly the process of developing pathways and program maps–with fresh ideas or insight into possible points of intersection across our college’s academic divisions?