In my childhood, whenever my family prepared for a road trip, one of the first things my mother would do was get the state atlas down from the shelf in the kitchen and locate our destination. Before determining the route, before making lists of things to pack, and before even making arrangements for lodging, it was important to know where we were going to be in the upcoming weeks or months. This concrete reality, that we were going to be in *that* spot on the map, was an essential first step to the rest of the journey’s planning.

Quality Matters and Stated Learning Objectives

When I conduct a Quality Matters Review, a feedback process for measuring and ensuring the quality of a course, a common learning objective issue often brings this memory of planning a family trip bubbling to the surface. According to Quality Matters, objectives should be measurable, precise, and clear descriptions of what learners will be able to do if they successfully complete the module or course.

However, a common mistake I see instructors make is that their objectives describe what the learners will be doing in the course rather than what they will be able to do when they reach the end of it. This distinction is important, because objectives are not a set of directions or instructions—they are the destination that learners are working towards. To that end, they should be “skills-centered,” not “assessment-centered.”

As an example of what I mean, let’s look at an objective focused on what the learners will be doing (the journey) and revise it to be focused on what they will be able to do (the destination).

• Choose an advertisement and conduct a visual rhetorical analysis, writing a minimum 750-word essay that discusses the advertisement’s argument, use of visual persuasive techniques, and quality of rhetorical appeals.

Though this objective is measurable (we can measure whether the learner has written the essay and the quality of that writing), the objective is “assessment-centered” and reads as a set of instructions, focusing on the essay. At the end of the module or course, is it our ultimate hope that learners will be able to write this specific essay? Or do we have higher hopes in mind?

Revising for “Able to Do“

Remember, the purpose of an objective is to set a concrete destination—it’s that end point my mother would point to on the map. The assignments and learning activities are how we’re getting to that destination, and the assessments are how we decide whether we’ve arrived. Right now, as it’s written, our sample objective is telling the learner more about how we’re making that journey and assessing it—not where we’re going. So, to revise it, we can ask ourselves, “If this is the journey, what is the destination that lay beyond it? What am I hoping learners can do at the end of this?”

In this particular example, and in many of the examples of this issue I’ve seen, we can get a glimpse of that destination in the objective as it is written. As it is written, it’s clear that the essay in question is looking to assess the learners’ discussion of a particular set of components: 1) the advertisement’s argument, 2) its use of visual persuasive techniques, and 3) the quality of its rhetorical appeals. Additionally, all these components fall under the broader directive of conducting a visual rhetorical analysis.

To help identify this skill, one of the first things we can do is eliminate the language in the objective that is immediately related to the assessment and see what we’re left with. To help make this more visual, I’ve highlighted the assessment-oriented language in yellow and the skills-oriented language in green.

• Choose an advertisement and conduct a visual rhetorical analysis, writing a minimum 750-word essay that discusses the advertisement’s argument, use of visual persuasive techniques, and quality of rhetorical appeals.

Once we’ve eliminated the assessment-oriented language, we’re left with:

• Conduct a visual rhetorical analysis that discusses the advertisement’s argument, use of visual persuasive techniques, and quality of rhetorical appeals.

Right away, this objective is beginning to look more like a specific skill and less like a set of instructions, and it’s becoming clear that “analysis” is the key skill that we’re hoping learners acquire.

To make this objective even stronger, we can massage the language a bit to make it slightly more general and widely applicable while also drilling down a little more with what we mean by “discusses” which is a bit vague and difficult to measure.

• Conduct a visual rhetorical analysis, analyzing and critiquing an argument’s use of visual persuasive techniques and the quality of its rhetorical appeals.

Now, the skill encompasses analyzing more than just a specific advertisement, and it’s unpacking “discusses” to get more specific and granular. We don’t want learners to just discuss these things, we want them to—specifically—analyze and critique them.

“But, John, what about the journey to that skill? Shouldn’t students know how they’re going to get there?”

The answer is yes! They absolutely should…but not in the objectives, themselves. Objectives are just a single component of the complex engine that is a course, and there are other parts of that engine that are better suited for making the relationship between activities, assessments, and objectives clear for learners. Module learning guides, for example, are an excellent tool for orienting learners to a given module and its objectives, and they can provide a space for explicitly laying out how the work of the module will lead to the destined outcomes.

Conclusion

Stated learning objectives are important, because they tell learners where their learning journey will be taking them, and they should focus on that destination, specifically.  

When working through this issue with faculty, one of my colleagues, Eva Grouling Snider, frames it as, “Consider how to make it so that your objective could be met through different means—such as if you change the course or someone else is teaching the course—without changing the objective.” This is a great framing because it underlines an added benefit of making objectives “skills-centered.” When we adjust objectives to focus on the destination, rather than the journey, not only do we make the outcome clearer for learners, but we also add in the bonus of making our courses more “future-proof.” Even if the course’s technology, modality, or assessments change, the objectives can remain the same. 

Writing objectives can be difficult! And I often see that difficulty reflected in the common mistake of conflating what students will be doing with what they will be able to do. However, by focusing on what they will be able to do, the endpoint of a given learning journey will be clear, allowing our learners to set their feet on the path with more confidence, clarity, and intention. 

While this is a common mistake I see in reviewing a course’s learning objectives, it is by no means the only objective-related issue instructors wrestle with. How do you approach learning objectives in your courses?