Merging Student Learning Objectives

The student learning objective merging tool is used when two or more SLOs need to be combined.

To merge two or more SLOs, simply navigate to the SLO Homepage, find and select the the SLOs that need to be merged. Once selected click the button. All selected SLOs will be listed in the resulting pop-up and will be summarized by their ID#, the linked Baseline/Evidence Assessments, and the number of students linked. Before proceeding, it is important to tell the application which selected SLO will be the Primary or "target" SLO. This determines which entered information will be used for the resulting SLO as some fields can only use one value. Also, select the HEDI (attainment) table that should be used in the case that these may be different across SLOs.

Before taking on the task of merging SLOs, it is important to know the end result achieved when two SLOs are merged because there will be some element of lost data for one or many SLOs.

Here's what happens when two SLOs are merged:

  1. The application does it best to combine items from all source SLOs, but for fields that can be assigned only one value the selected primary/target SLO will be used.

  2. All source SLOs will immediately become inactive as a result of the merge and a new SLO ID# will be assigned to the merged result.

  3. Most of the General information will use the selected target for the result of the merge, except for the selected grades. In other words, if an SLO can only have one title, we must use the title of the selected target SLO to determine the resulting title.

  4. If a teacher is linked to any of the source SLOs, then they will also be linked in the resulting merged SLO (This is a primary reason to merge SLOs to combine the SLOs of two teachers and make only one). If specific weighting has been entered in any of the source SLOs, these are reset to 100% in the resulting SLO.

  5. The Learning Content description will use the selected target, but any of the learning standards that have been linked to any of the source SLOs will also be included in the resulting merged SLO.

  6. The Baseline and Evidence assessments will be copied if and only if all source SLOs contain the same assessment(s). If there is any mismatch, no baseline of evidence assessments will be copied to avoid conflicts. In these cases, assessments will have to be relinked manually. You should receive a warning message about this if there is some mismatch.

  7. The student Population section of the SLO will combine all students that exist in all source SLOs, but ensure that each student is only linked once. If the assessment data is sourced from some linked baseline and/or evidence assessments, then each student data should transfer over nicely, but there are some instances where the entered student data has conflicting data entered for the baseline, target, and/or final scores. In these cases, each student that has a conflict will be displays in the Merge SLO pop-up and it will be required for the end-user to select which scores to use for the resulting SLO.

  8. Any Attachments and Discussion comments will be copied from the source SLOs and combined in the resulting SLO.