WF-02 — Curriculum Mapping and Learning-Outcome Alignment

This workflow produces no number, and it is still worth building carefully. KPI 2.1 awards 45% of its rubric weight to alignment with learning outcomes, and 2 of the 5 internal points inside that criterion turn on whether the assessment meets the relevant QFEmirates level requirement. That evidence is a curriculum map. It is produced here, in advance, and it cannot be produced during a CAA review visit that MBRU does not schedule.

1. Purpose

To ensure that every IoL programme holds a current, complete and defensible map linking programme learning outcomes to course learning outcomes, to the QFEmirates level of the award, to the skills the programme claims to develop, and to the assessments that evidence them, so that a reviewer arriving without notice can be shown alignment rather than told about it, and so that a learner can see what each course contributes to the award they are taking.

2. Scope

Scope statement. This process manages curriculum mapping for IoL programmes from the approval of a study plan, through the drafting and approval of programme and course learning outcomes and their alignment to QFEmirates level and skills, to the maintenance of the map through every subsequent curriculum change and its export to CHEDS.

Applies to. PGDipHPE and MScHPE. All programme learning outcomes (PLOs), all course learning outcomes (CLOs), the programme skills statement, the QFEmirates level mapping, and the alignment matrices linking PLOs to CLOs and CLOs to assessment.

Does not apply to. The design of individual assessment instruments, their blueprinting and moderation, which is WF-09. The creation or amendment of the study plan itself, which is WF-01. Course specification and industry co-development, which is WF-03. This workflow maps; it does not decide what courses exist or how they are assessed.

Applicable requirements. OBEF guide v11.5 KPI 2.1 rubric criterion 1; QFEmirates level descriptors for the award level of each programme [IoL to confirm the QFEmirates level assigned to PGDipHPE and to MScHPE]; CAA programme requirements for learning outcomes; HEDB Data Dictionary 2026 definitions for Program learning outcomes.xlsx, Course learning outcomes.xlsx and Program Skills.xlsx.

Why a mapping workflow sits in an OBEF pilot at all. Because the alternative is worse. An institution without a maintained map does not fail a curriculum-mapping KPI, since there is not one. It fails KPI 2.1 during a review visit, quietly, on a criterion carrying 45% of a 7.5-point rubric, and it never finds out which criterion it lost.

3. Trigger, boundary and endpoint

4. SIPOC

5. Accountability

Process owner. IoL Director of Programmes, or the role able to require a course lead to revise a CLO set and to take a revised map to governance.

Escalation.

6. Process steps

1. Confirm the study plan version in force. Take it from WF-01, with its version number and effective academic year. A map built against a superseded plan is worse than no map, because it is believed.

2. Draft or revise the programme learning outcomes. Express each PLO as an assessable outcome, not an aspiration. [CAPTURE] PLO code, Program learning outcome description, Program code. Serves 2.1 criterion 1 and the CHEDS PLO table.

3. Map each PLO to the QFEmirates level descriptor for the award. Record which descriptor strand each PLO addresses and where the evidence of level lies. [CAPTURE] the PLO-to-QFEmirates mapping with the level of the award. Serves 2.1 criterion 1, worth 2 of 5 internal points inside a criterion weighted 45%. This is the single highest-value step in the workflow. It is also the one most often left implicit, because everyone involved believes the level is obvious.

4. Draft or revise course learning outcomes for every course. One set per course, owned by the course lead. [CAPTURE] CLO code, CLO Description, Course code. Serves 2.1 criterion 1 and the CHEDS CLO table.

5. Map CLOs to PLOs. Every CLO maps to at least one PLO. Decision point. A CLO that maps to nothing is either a drafting failure or a signal that the course is teaching something the programme does not claim. Resolve it as one or the other; do not leave it unmapped and do not delete it silently.

6. Map CLOs to assessment. Identify, for each CLO, the assessment or assessments that evidence it. Hand the result to WF-09, which owns blueprinting. [CAPTURE] the CLO-to-assessment matrix. Serves 2.1 criteria 1 and 2. This is the artefact a reviewer asks for. WF-09 produces blueprints for individual assessments; this step produces the programme-level view that shows no PLO is unassessed.

7. Run the coverage and gap analysis. Three tests: every PLO has at least one assessed CLO; every CLO has at least one PLO; every PLO has a QFEmirates mapping. Record the result with a date, including the gaps found and what was done about them. A gap analysis that never finds a gap is not being run.

8. Derive the programme skills statement. Extract the skills the programme develops from the CLO set and the course descriptions, expressed in terms a non-academic reader recognises. [CAPTURE] Skills Description per programme. Serves the CHEDS skills table and the Future Readiness assessment, discussed in section 9.

9. Approve the map through curriculum governance. Record the version, the date and the effective academic year. Version the map, do not overwrite it. KPI 2.1 reviewers may request samples spanning several years, and a map without history cannot support a claim about an assessment from two years ago.

10. Publish to learners and to faculty. Publication has an OBEF consequence beyond transparency: KPI 2.6 asks students about curriculum relevance and skills acquisition, and students who can see what a course is for answer that question differently from students who cannot.

11. Export to CHEDS. Populate Program learning outcomes.xlsx, Course learning outcomes.xlsx and Program Skills.xlsx from the approved map, not from a parallel document. [CAPTURE] the export date and map version. Serves the submission and, indirectly, 2.1.

12. Maintain under change control. Any CLO or PLO change routes back through steps 5 to 9. A change to the study plan in WF-01 triggers this workflow automatically; a change to a course specification in WF-03 triggers steps 4 to 7.

7. OBEF data generated

Capture rule. One thing here cannot be reconstructed afterwards: the map as it stood in a given academic year. Everything else in this table is a current-state artefact that can be rebuilt from the study plan and the course specifications with effort. The historical map cannot, and it is exactly what a KPI 2.1 reviewer needs when they sample an assessment from two years ago and ask which outcome it was meant to measure. Version the map annually and retain the versions.

Reproducibility test. A second analyst can reproduce the CHEDS PLO, CLO and skills tables from the approved map with no tacit knowledge. They cannot reproduce the QFEmirates alignment or the CLO-to-assessment matrix unless those artefacts exist as records rather than as the Programme Director's understanding. On the assumption that the alignment currently lives partly in institutional memory [IoL to confirm], that is the capture defect this workflow closes, and it is the one KPI 2.1 is most likely to expose.

A note on what this table does not contain. No row here carries a KPI value. This workflow's entire OBEF output is evidence quality for an instrument the Ministry administers. That is a Category 1 position under the charter, and the lever is the input, not the number.

8. Max-score design

What this workflow must do to reach the target.

1. Hold a complete map. Coverage, not elegance, is what is scored. A PLO with no assessed CLO is a visible hole in criterion 1, and a reviewer will find it faster than IoL will.
2. Make the QFEmirates alignment explicit and documented per PLO. Two of five internal points inside the heaviest criterion turn on it, and an implicit alignment scores as an absent one.
3. Hold the map versioned by academic year, because reviewers may sample across years.
4. Produce the map on demand within two working days, not on notice. The CAA visit is not scheduled around the OBEF cycle, so permanent readiness is the only workable posture.
5. Publish the map to learners, which costs nothing and moves two of the four KPI 2.6 question domains.

[REDESIGN] actions.

A caution about effort. The temptation in curriculum mapping is to build an elaborate matrix that nobody maintains. The rubric does not reward elaboration. It rewards a complete, current, dated map that can be produced on request. Build the smallest map that passes the three tests at step 7, and spend the saved effort on keeping it current.

9. Indirect strategy where data cannot be collected

Category 4 applies: the activity exists but is invisible. IoL almost certainly aligns its teaching to outcomes and to the level of the award. Health professions education programmes are built that way, and the CAA would not have accredited them otherwise. What is missing, on the assumption stated above, is not the alignment but the artefact: the dated, versioned, per-PLO record that a reviewer can be handed. The response to Category 4 is capture, not tactics, and here capture means writing down a judgement that has already been made.

Why this is not a Category 1 problem, although KPI 2.1 is a Category 1 KPI. The Ministry holds the instrument and MBRU cannot compute the number. But the rubric is published, and criterion 1 is 45% of it. The input is entirely within IoL's control. The correct posture is therefore not "we cannot influence 2.1", it is "we can influence 2.1 only through evidence quality, so the evidence is the work".

The Future Readiness assessment, and what it is not. The Ministry's Future Readiness assessment extracts the skills a programme currently develops from its course descriptions and learning outcomes, and compares them with the skills demanded in job advertisements. A well-maintained CLO set and a clear Skills Description are the input to that comparison, which is a second reason to keep both current and written in language a labour-market classifier can read.

Be clear about its status: the Future Readiness assessment does not affect the OBEF score. It is a separate exercise. No OBEF KPI reads it, no weight is attached to it, and no threshold anchor references it. It is mentioned here because the same artefact serves both, and because a workflow that quietly optimises for the wrong instrument is a real risk when two Ministry exercises read the same input. Write the skills statement for accuracy about what the programme develops. If that also reads well against a labour-market comparison, good; if it does not, do not distort it.

A genuine ambiguity in the guide, flagged rather than resolved. KPI 2.1's criterion 1 awards 2 of 5 points for an assessment that meets "the relevant QFEmirates level requirement", but the guide does not state whether the relevant level is the level of the award, the level of the course within the programme, or the level implied by the individual outcome being assessed. For a postgraduate programme where some courses sit at the award level and others are foundational, these can differ. The defensible position is to map at the level of the award and to record, per course, where a component deliberately sits below it and why. That documented position survives either reading. Record the choice, hold it constant, and put the question to MoHESR at the next opportunity.

Boundary check. This workflow must never:

• assert a QFEmirates alignment that has not actually been assessed against the descriptors, because the assertion is cheap and the evidence is what is scored;
• backdate a map version to make an earlier assessment appear aligned;
• write a Skills Description describing skills the programme does not develop, in order to read better against the Future Readiness comparison, which does not affect the OBEF score in any case;
• delete an unmapped CLO to make the coverage analysis pass, instead of resolving whether the course or the programme outcome set is wrong;
• publish a map that disagrees with the study plan in force, since both are evidence and a contradiction between two IoL documents is worse than a gap in one.

10. Service standards

11. Records and evidence

Appendix B readiness. Appendix B does not name curriculum maps directly, because KPI 2.1 is collected by reviewers in person rather than by evidence request. That makes readiness harder, not easier: there is no 15 working day window during a review visit. The operative standard is the two working day production standard in section 10, applied to any academic year the reviewers choose. On the stated assumption, IoL could meet it for the current year and probably not for earlier years, which is action R3.

12. Risks and controls

13. Performance measures

The last measure is the honest test of this workflow. Alignment that exists only in the head of the person who designed the programme is real alignment and unscoreable evidence, and KPI 2.1 scores the evidence.

14. Change control