Treffer: The Digital Curriculum Database: Meeting the Needs of Industry and the Challenge of Enhanced Student Learning.

The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton, Alberta, has undertaken a project called LOGging Our Curriculum. The goals of the project, which involves creating a fully outcomes-based curriculum across the institution and housing that curriculum in a database that is accessible to NAIT instructors over the World Wide Web, are as follows: make NAIT more responsive to the fast-changing requirements of industry; provide instructors with shared curriculum development tools; and provide students with more learner-centered learning materials that follow a pedagogically accepted and systematic instructional design model. The project began with course-by-course identification of learning outcomes for all NAIT courses. Outcome statements were fashioned in a consistent institutional format incorporating an accepted list of verbs that can be classified according to Bloom's taxonomy. The project offered an opportunity to update the competency profile development process to normalize the function of curriculum validation and renewal in the context of instructors' regular work. Other important benefits of the shared database are its interdisciplinary nature and the fact that it keeps the overlapping of efforts to an absolute minimum. The curriculum database will also be an invaluable resource for NAIT's business unit as it designs customized training for a myriad of industry clients. (MN)