Course Design

Establishing learning outcomes

When designing any course, it’s extremely important to determine learning outcomes. In other words, what’s it that you simply want your learners to find out in your course? And the way will you recognize that they successfully mastered the content? This is often especially important in a web learning environment as learners will need more self-direction. You will not be there face to face to elucidate how each assignment and activity is tied to a selected learning outcome. Like other guidelines and expectations, confirm that these are easy to seek out and straightforward to know. Here are a couple of tips to think about when writing learning outcomes for your online course.

First, don’t create too many. Five to eight learning outcomes should be sufficient for your course. Make certain that these course outcomes align with the general curriculum. Also, confirm that they are well-written and straightforward to know. Each outcome should include who must accomplish it and what it’s that they have to accomplish. You’ll do that by selecting appropriate action verbs that are observable and measurable to work out whether the learner has successfully mastered the result. Avoid action verbs that are too vague like understanding, know, or appreciate. These are difficult to live with and can often confuse. Take a glance at some samples of action verbs that are good to use. These action verbs are easier to watch and measure and can bring better learning outcomes. I like to recommend doing a Google look for action verbs to seek out more examples. You ought to also determine whether your learning outcomes are knowledge-based or skill-based and include a number of each.

Let’s take a glance at a few examples. First, learners should be ready to list and describe the various components of effective communication. This is often an example of a knowledge-based learning outcome. Whereas the result learners should be ready to create a group of appropriate digital etiquette guidelines that focuses more on the skill of truly creating something. When creating your learning outcomes consider Bloom’s Taxonomy. As you progress up the diagram, you progress to higher-order thinking skills.

At rock bottom, there’s remember and understand represented by action verbs like to define, identify, or list. It’s acceptable to incorporate learning outcomes from all levels but it is best to put stress on the higher-order thinking skills like evaluate and make. Verbs to represent these include design, compare and contrast, propose, or analyze. These higher-order thinking skills show that learners not only understand the fabric but they will also apply it. When creating your learning outcomes, take a step back and begin with the large picture in mind. What do your participants get to learn? Then create your learning outcomes accordingly. Once created, throughout the course, any projects, assignments, and assessments that you simply use should be directly associated with these learning outcomes.