Incorporating Bloom's Revised Taxonomy into a Syllabus

Many higher education institutions recommend that instructors use Bloom's Revised Taxonomy when creating a syllabus. Here are a few examples: Chicago State University, Duquense University, University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina - Greensboro and University of West Florida.

Incorporating Bloom's Revised into a syllabus is very easy with the open source syllabus authoring tool Salsa. Action verbs grouped by Bloom's Revised are built into the product:

Instructors can select a level of Bloom's:

And when they click on the verb, it is added to the text editor:

What are your thoughts on Bloom's Revised in the syllabus?

Online Course Syllabus Template Tool

At FACT we have developed the Online Syllabus Template Tool (OSTT) to provide instructors developing online courses for higher education with:

- a context-specific syllabus structure consistent with the OAR model
- a sample syllabus that models best practices
- an easy-to-modify Microsoft Word template

The OSTT is an Adobe .pdf file that can be opened in the free Adobe Reader program. Users can navigate in the tool just as they would in a web page by mousing over buttons and clicking. Users can use "show info"/"hide info" buttons to toogle between a pageview that shows the sample language and or a pageview that shows descriptive information.

A download of the OSTT is available here.

Discovering and Documenting Faculty Pedagogical and Technological Beliefs

The Subject Matter Expert Personal Resources Inventory (SMEPRI) is a context-specific instructional tool developed to aid Instructional Designers in understanding the pedagogical and technological beliefs of Instructors. It is not designed to conduct an exhaustive inquiry, but rather to gather critical data from a short interview.

The SMEPRI gathers qualitative and quantitative data from four categories: time, experience, attitude and pedagogy. In our practice, Instructional Designers use this data as the development foundation for new online courses delivered through our learning management system-- Blackboard. We have seen that course designs based on the Subject Matter Expert/Facilitator's beliefs provide the greatest opportunity for alignment with their practices.

If you are interested in learning more about the SMEPRI, please contact me at george.joeckel@usu.edu.