As instructional designers, our team frequently faces a
common question from faculty developing fully online courses - "Why
do I need to provide students with learning objectives for every week, module,
or unit?" Although instructors typically understand the need for
course objectives and for ensuring alignment between those and the
various assessments within a course, the confusion often centers
around the value of overtly sharing objectives with learners.
There are many resources to which we could refer our
readers that would explain in excruciating detail a number of justifications
for the use of learning objectives in course design, development, and
delivery. However, for this short article, we'd like to share some
thoughts from the University of Michigan's Center for Academic
Innovation. In their online reference, Learning
Objectives and Outcomes, that office describes objectives for
students as analogous to effectively planning a trip. Specifically, they
assert that objectives make it "much easier for your students to
engage with your course if they know where they are headed."
The authors also describe the challenges of developing
and teaching online for many university faculty who have completed their
studies via mostly traditional, face- to-face instruction. Based on those experiences,
faculty may unintentionally lean toward a content-focused approach to online
course design, which often relegates learning objectives to a secondary or tertiary
concern.
To learn more about the "whys" and "whats" of student-level learning objectives, the University of Michigan post is well worth a quick read. For those who need help developing learning objectives of your own, the article recommends two online objective-building tools that you can use to walk you through the process of crafting your course outcomes:
- Arizona State University's Learning Objectives Builder
- University of Central Florida's Objective Builder Tool
Of course, our staff of instructional designers will be
standing by to offer personalized guidance and assistance, upon request.
Even though many of you may be off-contract and away from campus for the summer,
we'll still be here to answer any instructional design and instructional technology
questions that you may have.
