Designing Curriculum to Support Students

Their Approach

Chaffey College set out to make deeper connections between the classroom and employability skills. They wanted to integrate these skills across the college in Career Education (CE) and non-CE programs including core general education courses. Building from the New World of Work (NWOW) framework of 21st century workforce skills, they decided to align skills and competency acquisitions with institutional learning outcomes.

What They Did

A group of faculty started with the NWOW framework and modified it to align with institutional learning outcomes. They named their new framework the Academic Career/Community and Employability Skills (ACES). The faculty examined their existing curriculum to find assignments where rubrics could be revised to include ACES. After they revised some assignments and rubrics, they shared these in the Canvas Commons and began working with faculty across the college to do the same. The goal was to identify the assignments that help students to develop 21st century workforce skills to create a badging system. This digital badging system is taking off. Students earn badges issued from the career center as they complete their coursework. Each badge is coded with meta-data that allows a student or employer to click on the badge to see the skills learned and job trends associated with those skills.

What They Learned

The team at Chaffey College built on what already existed to create a framework that fit the needs and vision of the college. Faculty across the college worked with their existing assignments to make the skills more explicit and visible by aligning to the ACES framework. This made it easy for them to engage faculty by leveraging existing course institutional learning outcome mappings and using the Canvas Commons to share and store resources. The college is now moving to scale the approach by including ACES assessment as a component of program review for all programs.