Abstract:

Between 2017 to 2020, the Bachelor of Nutritional Science degree at Laval University’s Faculty of Agriculture and Agricultural Sciences underwent a complete overhaul of its program, now centred on the competency-based approach. The new program is built around a five-competency framework (professional practice, communication and collaboration, nutritional care, public health, and management) that students are invited to progressively develop throughout their three-and-a-half-year program.

Since competency development is a complex process, requiring time for improvements to manifest, monitoring of progress requires enough observations, spread throughout a program of study. To this end, the faculty’s Program Review Committee (PRC) decided to implement a 360-degree evaluation process in which all actors involved in the program provide feedback on several occasions respecting the development of student competencies. The PRC began by identifying relevant assessment opportunities in theoretical courses. Thus, each teacher was assigned the responsibility of assessing certain competencies, according to the pedagogical specifications developed. Subsequently, the competencies to be assessed by the supervisors of the three internships were identified. In addition, three new professional practice courses were added to the program to allow students to perform self-assessments of their performance and develop strategies to bring their skills to the level expected at the end of the program.

To support the 360o assessments, the PRC, assisted by a computer programmer and a pedagogical advisor, developed a digital tool called the Competency Development Tracker (CDT). The tool was inspired by e-assessment approaches that favour the use of online platforms to measure student learning and provide feedback. In addition to these two functionalities commonly found in e-learning tools, the CDT is also useful during pre-assessments that are performed at the pedagogical planning stage (Blueprint), as well as during the certification stage, at the end of the training, where the level of development of students' competencies is ultimately determined. In this respect, it is a comprehensive, unique, and innovative tool.

The objectives of this paper are to present:
1) The functionalities of the system (pedagogical design, evaluation, monitoring and certification), its advantages and disadvantages.
2) The results of the pilot implementation project which aims to evaluate the relevance, implementation, and appreciation of the system.
3) Potential future uses of the tool.

The CDT went live in autumn 2020, the same time as the first cohort started the new program. Since then, a total of 225 students (75 per cohort), 35 teachers, 178 internship supervisors and the Program Director have used the system. Appreciation surveys were sent to students at the end of each academic year to obtain their feedback regarding the tool. Teachers were also asked to express their views regarding the system via workshops. The final phase of the implementation pilot project will end in December 2023 when the first cohort admitted to the new programme will graduate. A report on the pilot project will be submitted to faculty administrators and a strategy for analysing the data collected to improve the teaching-learning-evaluation sequence of the programme will be developed.

Keywords:

Competency evaluation, e-assessments, pedagogical design, feedback.