Learning Objectives
We've discussed learning objectives in the QM Standards Unit, and now, it's time to dive in and write learning objectives for your course!
Course goals are the "big ideas" you are going to teach your students in your course. Generally, a course will have 2-5 course goals, but it can have more.
When writing course goals, you might ask yourself the following questions:
For the course you've chosen to develop, and based on your understanding of what a course goal should look like and do, write two to five course goals. You might find the examples below helpful. (You'll eventually state your course goals on the assignment in your blog titled Course Plan. More on that later; for now, keep reading.) After you've written your course goals, you'll move on to writing more specific unit-level objectives.
Extensive list of examples of course goals in various disciplines from Carnegie Mellon. Not all of them are fully exemplary, but you know enough by now to recognize that some of them may have problems. That is always the case in the real world of course design. I can show you some near-perfect examples, but you learn just as much by looking at imperfection. And, you'll see a lot more imperfection even in good courses than you will perfection.
(http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/learningobjectives-samples/)
A learning objective is an outcome statement (one sentence) that describes specifically the knowledge, skills, or attitudes a learner should exhibit after experiencing instruction. A learning objective is not a statement of what the instructor or the course will do ("I will teach them about structure fires"), and it is not a statement of what the student will do in the learning activity itself ("The student will watch a video"). It is a statement of the behavior the student will exhibit after he or she experiences the instruction, and that behavior should be reflected in the assessment ("The student will list the five stages of a structure fire after viewing the structure fire video").
When writing learning objectives, you might ask yourself the following questions:
How would you measure the verbs below? With these verbs, how could you make your method of measurement (the behavior you expect) clear to the student? In other words, how can I observe my student "knowing"? How do I measure "appreciation"? You might be able to come up with some interesting responses to those questions. However, if you are heading for a QM review, it is probably best to avoid the following verbs because they are not considered measurable (refer to Standards 2.1 and 2.2):
View the six levels of Bloom's Taxonomy below, and note their definitions. It is important to note that Knowledge is the lowest level of cognitive processing and Evaluation is the highest in most representations of Bloom's.
General Standard 2 is the key standard for "alignment" in a course, and it is the only broad standard under which all specific review standards are essential. Alignment as it relates to the QM rubric refers to the "matching up" (to put it very simply) of the core elements of a course. Stated another way, it refers to the integration of the learning objectives, assignments, activities, and assessments in a course. In other words, all activities, assignments, and assessments in a course should have a matching or "aligned" learning objective, and all learning objectives should have an aligned assessment and aligned learning activity.
When developing activities and assignments that align with your learning objectives, you might find this table of Bloom's levels, keywords, and sample question stems helpful.
When you are writing your learning objectives, it is helpful to have a list of verbs to get started. Refer to the PDF below for help. (Remember: if you see a blank white box below, your computer may be blocking the content, or it may have downloaded the PDF to your Downloads folder.)
A good learning objective should have several important components. Please see Penn State's ABCD method.
Example: After completing the unit on the digestive system, the student will identify the organs of the digestive tract and its accessory organs on a drag-and-drop diagram with 85% accuracy.
Because you have not designed your assessments and activities yet, you may not be ready to include the conditions and degrees of mastery, but I want you to see what an ideal learning objective looks like (example above). For the purposes of our course, and because of the course development stage we are in right now, you should write learning objectives that include an audience and a behavior. Including the condition and degree of mastery are optional at this point, and they are often not found in learning objectives for academic courses because the level of mastery is dictated by the leveling in letter grades, and conditions are assumed. However, you can probably see how all four components would be necessary in a workplace setting where there are no letter grades and assumptions might be risky.
The objectives should be measurable and written from the student point of view. They should be appropriate for the level of the course. (Do those criteria sound familiar? They come directly from the QM Rubric!) Commonly, you will see objectives in courses that have only the audience and behavior components, but sometimes, it is quite necessary to include a condition or degree of mastery to clarify the objective.
You should write all learning objectives for your entire course in order to complete the Course Goals and Learning Objectives assignment (to be submitted on your blog page, Course Plan). You are not committed to keeping these learning objectives as you write them today for the duration of your course development. In fact, I expect that you will modify, add, and delete learning objectives as your course development progresses and you recognize a need for changes. You have an idea about where you want your students to eventually end up, so do the best you can with expressing that end result in a set of learning objectives that describe all of the important student outcomes of your course.
It is important to note that when you teach the course, you will be committed to the learning objectives as written at the beginning of the term for the duration of that term.
Proceed to the next page for instructions on how to submit your Course Goals and Learning Objectives assignment.
You should first write your course goals according to the guidelines given earlier in this lesson. You should have between two and five goals. If you need to have more, that is probably okay, but you might want to consult with me to be sure they can't be reduced in number by using different wording or with some generalization.
After you've written down the "big ideas" (the course goals) for your course, write the more specific things you want your students to accomplish: your learning objectives. The number of objectives you should write depends on many things. You may have as few as 10 or as many as 50. This is the point at which you will begin thinking about how you divide your course into modules or units. You aren't required to do that dividing now, but it might help you think about the learning objectives you need to write. For example, if you are teaching a beginning human biology course for non-health majors and you know you want to organize your course by the 11 body systems, then you might want to write two or three learning objectives for each body system.
You aren't committed to keeping these learning objectives exactly as you write them now for the duration of your course development. In fact, I would expect that you will modify the objectives as needed as you progress through the development of your course and rethink your wording and logistics. Write the best learning objectives you can based on what you know about your course right now.
You may use the template provided for you in our blog template where you will find this assignment, one of the examples of course calendars/course plans in the Resources section of Carmen Content, or you can create your own template. It is important to note that you need to clearly show how your course goals and learning objectives are aligned, and you'll eventually have to show how your assessments and activities are aligned with your objectives. With this in mind, you might as well use a template where you can eventually demonstrate all of those things very clearly. Be sure to consult the grading rubric for this assignment in the Rubrics tool in Carmen.