The article from Allan Davies has helped me to understand better the background behind Learning Outcomes and Assessment criteria. How the learning outcomes and assessment criteria should be related to the student experience. Or opposite, considering a student-centered learning, how the desired student experience should have relevant. LO and an Assessment criteria 

According to Allan Davies, there is consensus on the value of learning outcomes and how they should be articulated. The concern is to avoid ambiguity in the writing and presentation of the learning outcomes for art and design. 

Allan Davies highlights that the Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria development was quite different across institutions. Different scenarios can be found, being the best, the one with unambiguous LO, where students understand them and the worst scenario, the one where LO are ambiguous and students don’t understand (something went wrong) or where LO are unambiguous and students also don’t understand.

The author highlights the scenario where LO are unclear, but the students have clarity. As it doesn’t mean there are no other support systems that help students to understand what they have to do to successfully overcome their program of work.

Another area of consideration is how to express LO relevant for the skills that should be developed by art and design students, related with the use of imagination, visualization, intuition, inventiveness, risk-taking, etc. How to capture these concepts in LO form? These are terms that can’t be so easily measured.

If we are too specific with LO, we create a big constraint on the quarry to the students and that is not aligned with creative subjects. For art and design students, finding their own quarry is an essential part of their discovery/creative process. However, they need to know the ‘landscape’ and the ‘boundaries’. It might be that these are better articulated in the form of a discourse than in specific outcome form and more usefully manifested in project briefings, team meetings, etc. as the author mentions.  I believe a holistic assessment is more relevant for art and design students.

There is one paragraph that really resonates with my personal experience as HPL:

 “Unless a teacher has been party to the design and development of a programme, he or she will not necessarily understand how what they are expected to do fits into the whole. Programme design in such a complex landscape is often a negotiation of the language that embraces it. Only the course designers have a real understanding of how things fit together. New or part-time teachers, for instance, have to take the module outlines at face value and make sense of them in terms of their own professional experience. The greater the number of outcomes and the more elaborate the assessment scheme the more likely the whole thing will be sidestepped. Common sense often prevails in these circumstances. “

  When the teacher is not part of the creation of the course/unit brief, it is a task to embrace them and deliver them up to the standard. 

How the brief creation process is as important as the brief itself, as well as the feedback we get on the way. I also believe on the practice of revaluating the brief and update it on the way to deliver the best learning experience.