Session Description:
How can institutions support students in the hours they spend outside the classroom? For more than a decade, the University of Pittsburgh answered that question with The Outside the Classroom Curriculum (OCC). The OCC, powered by Suitable, is a national model for competency-based student engagement and a strategic framework for improving career readiness, placement rates, persistence and time to graduation.
Recently, Pitt asked the question again, and the answer led to a bold redesign. Rather than completing 10 competency areas, students now grow along five learning pathways. Together they span Creative Expression and Culture, Purpose and Career Confidence, Civic Leadership and Community Action, Well-Being and Personal Flourishing, and Connected and Proud at Pitt. Attendance alone will no longer earn students credit. Students must reflect as they participate, a practice that builds the self-awareness to recognize what they’ve gained and the language to share it.
In this session, Glen Edward, Assistant Director of the OCC, takes you inside the redesign. He’ll cover the research that informed it, the tradeoffs the team weighed, and how his expertise shaped the new structure. Suitable will also share how its best-in-class student engagement platform makes learning, progress, and growth visible to students and staff alike.
Competencies will always be a part of the OCC’s foundation, and they remain a powerful approach. This session simply widens the lens. Come ready to consider how career readiness, well-being, belonging and civic purpose can reinforce one another, and what that might mean for the programs you lead. You’ll leave with new ideas to spark innovation and improvement of your own programs, whether you’re refining an existing program or exploring a new one.
A live Q&A at the end will answer your questions and generate productive dialogue.
Attendees will learn:
- The research and reasoning that led Pitt to move from a competency-based model to its five learning pathways, and how students complete the program.
- Best practices for embedding reflection into the student experience so participation turns into learning, and translates into a meaningful story students can tell.
- How Suitable’s student engagement platform enabled Pitt to customize and evolve the OCC to meet its new strategic objectives and scale to more than 20,000 undergraduate students.
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