In this introductory workshop, the need for careful curriculum planning was explored.

It is essential to clearly specify what you are trying to teach your students. Assessment can then be seen as measuring how well students have learnt what you wish them to learn.

• Why is it important to plan the whole program and its component courses together? The idea of 'curriculum alignment' was discussed as a way means doing the overall planning.
  
• What characteristics do we want to see in our graduates? How can we specify the skills and knowledge that graduates from our programs need to acquire for their professional lives? How can we design each individual course within a program so that it contributes to the skills and knowledge graduates need? Different skills needed in defining intended learning outcomes were examined, both at a program (graduate) level and at the level of individual courses. The idea of a curriculum matrix was used.
  
• Why are clearly stated learning outcomes essential to good educational planning? Practices - writing clear intended learning outcomes (at a course-level), focusing especially on learning outcomes which relate to higher order thinking or complex professional skills. Checklists and a classification scheme were provided to assist with this.
  
• How do these learning outcomes relate to planning effective assessment strategies? Learning outcomes provide the criteria (hence the term 'criterion-referenced') for working out what appropriate assessments might be.