"Starting this Fall 2014, all syllabi must include learning outcomes. This is now a requirement in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the University. Please put the learning outcomes on the first page of your syllabus. See http://provost.wayne.edu/news_archive.php?id=12179 for more information.
"Formulating learning outcomes is an important part of course design and for continuous course improvement, communication of expectations to students, and alignment of student assessment and activities with the learning objectives."
I have been receiving endless notifications from my university about this new requirement. I've been willing to do it -- I added boilerplate language in my syllabi this semester to conform with the requirement. What *really* angers me, however, is language like the above, which states that putting such language in the syllabus has anything whatsoever to do with improving teaching. This is not true. The *only* reason for putting "learning outcomes" into syllabi is to increase bureaucratized standardization and control of teaching -- with the ultimate goal, probably, of having everything quantified so that teachers/professors can be subjected to "competition" and fired more easily, and so that university education can be reduced to a matter of instilling marketable skills, with anything having to do with imagination, creativity, critical thinking, and departing from pre-established norms completely suppressed. The requirement for "learning outcomes" is a Trojan Horse -- it seems innocuous in itself, but in fact it is a wedge toward the goals of destroying education as we have known it up to now (and as sometimes, in the best cases,it actually is), and reducing both faculty and students to the status of menial laborers interchangeable at will. The "learning outcomes" requirement is completely anti-educational and anti-intellectual. Now, there are lots of things I have to do despite not liking doing them; some of these things are even necessary if we are to have a civilized society. I am not one to go on ego trips over small matters of perceived insult or inconvenience to myself. So I will put these "learning outcomes" into syllabi -- hypocrisy is part of the price we pay for not having society be reduced to a war of all against all. But I will also not shut up when confronted with this bullshit -- all the more so since, in the present case, the purpose of the hypocrisy is precisely to demolish society in the name of the supremacy of our corporate overlords, who want nothing more than to have everything besides their own comfortable, powerful, and rich position to indeed be a war of all against all.