Strategic Learning as a Best Practice
Strategic Learning at Ball State
Strategic Learning at Ball State
An adaptive culture of rigorous assessment and evaluation for online and technology-enhanced teaching, learning, and services.
Strategic learning is defined as “using evaluation to help organizations or groups learn quickly from their work so they can learn from and adapt their strategies. It means integrating evaluation and evaluative thinking into strategic decision making and bringing timely data to the table for reflection and use.” (Source: Center for Evaluation Innovation)
As a corollary to strategic learning, strategic teaching can be defined as “a way of making decisions about a course, an individual class, or even an entire curriculum with an analysis of key variables in the teaching situation. These variables include the characteristics of the learners, the learning objectives, and the instructional preferences of the teacher. Once these variables have been analyzed, informed decisions can be made about course content, structure, methods of assessments, and other key components.” (Source: MIT Teaching + Learning Lab)
Ball State’s Division of Online and Strategic Learning builds upon these definitions of “strategic learning” and “strategic teaching” in our vision and mission statements, especially in terms of using data-driven methods, rigorous assessment, and timely evaluation to create an adaptive culture around teaching and learning practices and student support services at Ball State.
