MSBAi Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs)
⚠ THIS DOCUMENT IS AN INCOMPLETE STUB. IT IS NOT AN AUTHORITATIVE LIST.
It holds one outcome. A degree needs a set. The remaining outcomes have not been drafted, and they are not going to be drafted here, because defining what a graduate of this program can do is a faculty and program-leadership exercise, not a writing exercise. Nothing on this page has been approved.
Do not cite this file as the MSBAi program learning outcomes. Do not use it for accreditation, the AACSB curriculum map, marketing copy, syllabus alignment, or any statement about what the program guarantees. Until program leadership completes and approves the set, the honest answer to “what are the MSBAi PLOs?” remains: not yet documented.
What this file is for: to give the work a home, so that the next outcome that gets drafted has somewhere to go and does not sit stranded inside a proposal document. That is the whole of its purpose.
Status
| State | Stub. 1 outcome staged, 0 approved. Total intended count unknown. |
| Created | 2026-07-28 |
| Owner of the completion work | Program leadership (Vishal Sachdev, Lorena Nicholas), with faculty input |
| Blocking action item | “Document MSBAi program-level learning outcomes (PLOs) formally”, open in the internal action-item tracker since 2026-04-10. Creating this stub does not close it. |
| Open question | “Who completes the MSBAi program learning outcome set, and by when?” (2026-07-28) — tracked in the internal open-questions registry (ask K-ai) |
What is already known and needs reconciling. Lorena Nicholas stated in April 2026 that “program-level learning outcomes remain the same as the residential version.” If that holds, most of the completion work is retrieval and adaptation of the residential MSBA outcome set rather than drafting from scratch, and the first step is obtaining that set rather than convening a workshop. That has not been done. Whether an AI-native online program can inherit a residential program’s outcomes unchanged is itself a question for program leadership, not an assumption to make here.
Why the PLOs matter beyond documentation. They are a prerequisite for two live pieces of work: the AACSB curriculum map (pending), and the capstone learning outcomes, which per Martin Maurer’s guidance must align directly to the PLOs because the capstone is the program’s primary integrated assessment point [source: internal decision registry, “AACSB capstone learning outcome design: Martin Maurer’s guidance”].
The shape every outcome on this page must take
Recorded AACSB guidance (Martin Maurer)
Martin Maurer, Senior Director, Faculty Development & Accreditation. Recorded verbatim in the internal decision registry (available from K-ai) under the heading “AACSB capstone learning outcome design: Martin Maurer’s guidance”. These four are his, and they are constraints rather than suggestions. Nothing below this subheading is Maurer’s; do not cite it as accreditation guidance.
- Align capstone outcomes directly with the program-level learning outcomes. The capstone is treated as the program’s primary integrated assessment point.
- Concrete, measurable, observable verbs. Maurer’s examples: integrate, evaluate, design, justify, communicate. Avoid vague terms such as understand and appreciate.
- Group work must be assessable at both the team AND the individual level. Accreditation requires evidence of individual student learning, not just team output.
- Each outcome maps to a specific artifact (Maurer’s examples: report, presentation, peer evaluation) with a rubric that can generate Learner Outcome Assessment (LOA) data.
Local drafting convention (this document’s own, not Maurer’s)
One addition, adopted here on 2026-07-28 and flagged as local so it is never mistaken for an accreditation requirement: each outcome names where it is taught, where it is reinforced, and where it is assessed. This is ordinary curriculum-map practice and it is what the pending AACSB curriculum map will need anyway, but Maurer did not state it. Every entry below carries a taught / reinforced / assessed table for that reason. Any outcome added later without one is incomplete.
PLO 1 (proposed, not approved): Version-controlled professional practice
Source: design/github_strategy.md §4, proposed 2026-07-28. Pending approval by program leadership. The wording here and the wording there are kept identical; this file is the one to edit.
Graduates manage, evidence, and present analytical work using industry-standard version control.
Specifically, a graduate can:
- Maintain a repository of their own analytical work, committing incrementally so that the history is a truthful record of how the work developed.
- Collaborate on a shared repository with teammates, using branches and pull requests, and resolve the conflicts that collaboration produces.
- Evaluate AI-generated work before committing it, and document what the AI contributed and how it was verified.
- Present a public repository as professional evidence of their capability to an external audience.
Note what is deliberately absent: any requirement to recall git commands. The outcome is about the practice, not the syntax, consistent with the program stance that execution is the part AI handles and judgement is the part the student owns [source: design/why_show_your_thinking.md, Specify / Execute / Verify].
Taught, reinforced, assessed
| Stage | Where | What happens | Evidence produced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taught | BADM 554, the first course | The whole onboarding: account, verification, first repo, first commit, first push, then branches and pull requests later in the term | The student’s portfolio repository exists and has a real history |
| Reinforced | Every subsequent course, at essentially zero cost | Each course’s individual assignments are submitted in Canvas as a commit permalink plus the exported file. No new content, no new video, no instructor time. The repetition is the teaching. | A continuous commit history spanning the whole degree |
| Assessed (summative) | The capstone / Practicum | The portfolio repository is a capstone artifact. Its history is read as evidence of individual contribution behind a team grade, which is exactly the individual-level evidence AACSB requires. | Rubric-scored artifact producing LOA data |
| Assessed (formative) | BADM 554 | One oral-defense prompt: “open your commit history and walk me through it.” Live, unfakeable, and it uses evidence that already exists. | A defense rubric prompt, not a rubric row, so it consumes no grade weight |
Why the capstone and not course one. Assessing this in BADM 554 would assess a skill three weeks old. Assessing it at the capstone assesses whether it stuck across fifteen months, which is what a program outcome is supposed to measure. It also lands the LOA data collection at the point the program has already identified as its primary integrated assessment [source: internal decision registry, “AACSB capstone learning outcome design: Martin Maurer’s guidance”].
Dependency worth naming: the reinforcement mechanism is a submission-format convention applied in all six courses. If that convention is not adopted program-wide, this outcome loses its reinforcement stage and becomes a single-course topic that is then assessed fifteen months later. The outcome and the convention are approved together or neither is meaningful.
PLO 2 onward: not drafted
Deliberately empty. Filling this section with plausible-sounding outcomes to make the document look complete would be worse than leaving it short: it would produce a list that reads as authoritative, gets copied into a syllabus or an accreditation document, and is never traced back to the fact that nobody approved it.
What completing this document actually requires
- Obtain the residential MSBA program learning outcomes and confirm Lorena’s April statement that MSBAi inherits them unchanged.
- Decide whether inheritance is appropriate, given that MSBAi is positioned as AI-native and the residential outcomes predate that positioning. If it is not, the delta needs drafting and approving.
- Confirm or reject PLO 1 above, which is program-specific and has no residential equivalent.
- Check the set against the Maurer criteria (measurable verbs, artifact plus rubric producing LOA data, individual-level assessability, capstone outcomes aligned to the PLOs) and, separately, against this document’s own local convention (named taught / reinforced / assessed locations).
- Build the curriculum map: every outcome against every course, marking taught / reinforced / assessed. This is the AACSB deliverable, and it is the step that exposes outcomes nothing actually assesses.
- Record the approval in the internal decision registry (via Vishal or K-ai) and close the 2026-04-10 action item.
Related
program/curriculum.md: program structure, courses, sequence. PLOs will need to be referenced from, or moved into, the curriculum once approved.courses/practicum.md: the capstone, the primary integrated assessment point for PLOs.design/assessment_strategy.md: AIAS levels, rubric patterns, the pre-AI / AI / post-AI staging that outcome evidence runs through.design/github_strategy.md: origin of PLO 1 and the submission convention it depends on.