Learning Plan

What exactly is a Learning Plan? What should it include?

To answer this question takes a little background. If you consider the last two years of an engineering degree, the knowledge and skills a student learns can be broken into some unit. For example, a student might be expected to learn 1/4th of their competencies in a semester, if they have four semesters in their last two years.

At IRE our unit is a project. If a student does x projects in their time at IRE, then each project should represent 1/x of their learning. Right now we are in the process of making visible to the students what 100% of their learning should look like. To do this we have identified all of the technical knowledge and professional competencies that they should acquire/attain. To quantify this we use "arrows" to represent a continuum from 1-10. A continuum from novice to expert. We use Bloom's Taxonomy to show low level learning at 1 and high level synthesis/evaluation at 10. We consider that "work-ready" should equate to a 6 which is higher level analysis. Our expectation is that an IRE graduate will attain a 6 or higher in the vast majority of the nearly 100 "arrows".

As the students prepare a work-plan to describe how they will meet the clients needs for a project, they are also preparing a learning-plan to show what learning they will need to do during the project cycle. This learning plan should account for 1/x of their IRE learning. Included in the learning plan:

• What technical and professional competencies are being addressed?
• What is the student's individual starting level in that competency?
• What is the student's target level for the end of the cycle?
• What learning activities will be used to empower the student to achieve this new level? In other words what resources are needed - faculty, external expert, peer, research, self learning.
• What assessments will be employed to guide the learning?
• What are the different kinds of evidence that will demonstrate that the learning has been achieved?

This process must be interactive with our faculty so that students can get assistance in planning and in identifying potential resources as well as what things don't the students know that they don't know (unknown unknowns).

Right now we are in J1. The first industry project in the junior year. The learning plans are being developed in conjunction with the design work plans.