Standards-based Learning Groups

3/21/2018

Tonight, we’re releasing new functionality to support standards-based learning (SBL) groups.  Often groups of courses share the same learning targets, rubrics, assessments, etc. It often makes sense for SBL entities to apply to many courses (instead of making separate copies for each course).  As a concrete example, it would be useful to organize 3 courses with the same subject/grade level (“7th Math-RTI,” “7th Math-Core,” and “7th Math-Accelerated”) into an SBL group called “7th Math,” and build one set of learning targets, rubrics, etc. for all courses.

Similar functionality exists within TeacherEase already, but it’s not obvious to use.  Today, it’s possible to put learning targets on multiple courses, effectively creating an SBL group.  We decided to make the organizational structure explicit, so it’s more understandable and usable.

You can view the SBL group for a course on the “Course-Single View” page.  There will be a new tab called, “SBL Group.” The tab will show the name of the group and all courses in the group.

Admin Main > Courses > Course-Single View

As part of the release, we’ll automatically create many SBL groups.  If a single course is in the group, we’ll name the group the same as the course.  If there are multiple courses, we wrote an algorithm to attempt to choose suitable names.  Feel free to look at the SBL group names, and edit ones you feel need improvement. This can be done from the Course Catalog page (for brevity, single course groups are not displayed):

Admin Main > Courses > Course Catalog > view > (click edit on SBL Group tab)

One final note, SBL groups can be changed yearly, but can't be modified once learning targets are used on units, lessons, assignments, report cards, etc.  You may find that your current groups are sub-optimal, want to change them, but cannot. It’s easy to modify SBL groups for the next academic year. We recommend copying today’s groups to a future academic year, and making changes there.  Do this before building units, lessons, etc. as SBL groups become locked for that year once learning targets are used.

The Common Goal Team