✔️ Learning outcomes are clearly defined, measurable, and aligned to learning activities and assessments.
Review These Explanations
Learning outcomes are essentially milestones on the learning pathway – milestones that learners need to achieve in order to succeed. Course outcomes should express some level of mastery that learners will need to demonstrate as a result of participating fully in the course. Learners need to understand how what they are learning, and what they are required to demonstrate, are connect to the course outcomes.
All course content, learning activities, interactions and assessments should be in alignment with these outcomes. These relationships should be clearly explained in order to provide relevance of learning to the learners (Knowles, 1984). Outcomes should address what learners need to know when they complete the module, course, or program, and aligned activities and assessments should showcase how learners have achieved those outcomes.
Keep in mind that well written learning outcomes are made up of four parts – the identity of the learner, the skill that you want the learner to demonstrate, the conditions under the learner will demonstrate that skill, and the criteria in place to measure mastery of that skill.
Overall course outcomes should be clearly communicated via the syllabus and course information documents, and module outcomes should be introduced at the beginning of every module.
Refresh Your Course with These Ideas
General Suggestions
- Map all content, interaction, activity, and assessment to module, course, and program outcomes. This exercise will show you if your objectives are aligned, and if one or more course elements needs to be adapted to better meet the set outcomes. This can be done with a simple table where each activity and assignment are listed (rows), and a check mark indicates associated outcomes (columns).
- Avoid “busy work” or assignments not clearly aligned with stated outcomes.
- Explore Bloom’s Taxonomy and associate resources to better understand types of outcomes and related examples of ways to measure success through activities and assessments.
Examples
- Use verbs that are actionable and measurable in writing outcomes. Test each outcome by detailing out exactly how you are measuring it, and how you will know learners have met set criteria.
- Verbs should be measurable in describing outcomes. “Learners will understand” is not measurable. How will learners demonstrate, or make their “understanding” visible? Preferred: “You will research and write a five page research paper to demonstrate your understanding of x” is a measurable activity.
- How NOT to Write Objectives.
- Bloom Taxonomy with Verbs.
- Action Verbs for Learning Objectives.
- ASU Learning Objectives Builder.
- Create a course or module map to share with your learners that details how each outcome falls in sequence in the course, along with the activities and assignments that measure associated knowledge and/or mastery.
- Use the 2nd person (you/your) tense in communicating the outcomes, instead of a generic “learners will learn”. This personalizes the statement for your learners.
- Reiterate the association and alignment of learning outcomes by listing any associated outcomes in the activity or assignment instructions.
Explore More Refreshing Ideas from the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) at the University of Central Florida (UCF)
This Pedagogical Practice from TOPR explores the purpose and benefits of breaking down course objectives to the modular level, and provides an example of scaffolding learning across modules.