ESEB3493 LEARNING DESIGN

TOPIC 5 Designing Course Goals and Objectives

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Understanding Course Goals

• Course goals reflect what you want your students to know

and understand.
• Course goals should be deliberately broad and vague.
• Goals should reflect essential questions for your course
and/or discipline.
• A sample course goal might be “Students will understand the
effects of global warming”.

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Course goals

• Express the teacher’s hopes, wishes, and/or ideals for the

overall educational experience students will have in a course.
• Represent the teacher or teaching perspective on the course,
describing what the course will do for the students.
• Reflect on what the teacher want the students to learn and
understand.
• Provide an overarching framework for why the course looks
the way it does, why the specific learning objectives have
been chosen, and how these things are connected.

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Action Verbs

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Learning Objectives

• Each learning objective should be connected to or stem from

a course goal.
• Learning objectives reflect what you want your students to be
able to do (use action verbs).
• Learning objectives should describe what students should
know or be able to do in class or throughout the lesson.
Example: Students will be taught to…
• Write a literature review with the correct format in citation
following the APA style.

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Learning Objectives

• The objectives must be clear to students.

• They ALL must know WHAT they are learning and WHY they
are doing it.
• They also need to see the point of the objectives in the bigger
picture; that is, how they relate to the last lesson’s learning,
the course they are following and the big overall goal.
• The objectives must be differentiated for the individual student

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SMART Goal Setting With Your Students

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Learning outcomes

• A learning outcome is a clear statement of what a learner is expected to

be able to do, know about and/or value at the completion of a unit of study,
and how well they should be expected to achieve those outcomes. It
states both the substance of learning and how its attainment is to be
demonstrated.
• Learning outcomes describe the measurable skills, abilities, knowledge
or values that students should be able to demonstrate as a result of a
completing a course. They are student-centered rather than teacher-
centered, in that they describe what the students will do, not what the
instructor will teach.
• Good learning outcomes emphasize the application and integration of
knowledge. Instead of focusing on coverage of material, learning
outcomes articulate how students will be able to employ the material, both
in the context of the class and more broadly.

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Good examples for Learning Outcomes

• Good course objectives will be specific, measurable, and written from

the learner's perspective. Here's a good formula for writing objectives:
• Course objectives:
• By the end of the course, students will be able to:
(Choose an action verb that corresponds to the specific action you
wish students to demonstrate)
– Explain 7 steps in the research process …
– Write an essay of about 1000 words …
– Answer 10 comprehension questions…
– Analyze the role of William Shakespeare in his time.

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THANK YOU

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