Learning Goals, Learning Objectives and Backward Design, Oh My!

One of the hurdles experienced by many instructors in higher education is the practice of hiring based on a graduate degree in one’s subject matter but which isn’t necessarily accompanied by any pedagogical training. This is an offshoot of the mistaken belief that if one knows a subject well, one is automatically going to be able to teach that subject. Au contraire, mon ami! As I’m sure many of you have come to realize, teaching is its own skillset. 

Cultivating new knowledge and/or skills is the whole point of teaching and learning. A finely-crafted lecture—or in the case of asynchronous online courses, well-designed content—may be fascinating and even full of sparkling wisdom but if there’s no cognitive or behavioral change in students as a result, it’s all just entertainment (or drudgery, depending on the perspective). As one of my mentors said, “Telling ain’t teaching.”

Traditional methods of curriculum planning, where a list of content is the starting point and outcomes and assessments come last, often lead to missing content (where the content provided doesn’t match what’s being assessed) or the dreaded “bloat” (you know, when the course is full of “Oh, that would be good for them to know!” stuff but is lacking a solid progression leading to specific learning outcomes). 

Typically, the missing ingredient is strategic planning based on a set of well-defined and clearly articulated learning objectives.  

Getting Strategic About Course Design

As a first step in our strategic course design, let’s draw the distinction between learning goals and learning objectives. In the educational context, goals are the higher-level outcomes you plan to accomplish in the course. Objectives are the specific, measurable competencies students will demonstrate that lead to that goal. For example, my goal might be: “understand the concept of conditional probability” and a correlating objective might be: “calculate the conditional probability of a given event using a tree diagram.” 

Once you’ve got a solid learning objective—clear, focused and measurable—your next step is to determine how you’ll assess whether students have mastered that objective (that’s why “measurable” is so important). Then it’s an easy jump to the final step of figuring out what content and activities—lecture, reading, videos, case studies, practice examples, etc.—will support students in achieving and demonstrating their competency. 

Voilà! There’s your course design sequence: goals 🡪 objectives 🡪 assessments 🡪 content. This is often referred to as backward design and ensures that your outcomes and assessments map across to the content you’re providing students. It’s akin to taking a road trip and choosing your destination first, then planning the route and rest stops so you’re sure to arrive when and where you want. 

It all starts with the humble learning objective. 

Writing an Effective Learning Objective

How do you write a well-defined and clearly articulated objective? I’m so glad you asked!

I’ll give you the basics here but know that a Google search for “how to write learning objectives” returned 251,000,000 results so there are plenty of resources out there if you want more details. (I particularly liked this article on why objectives matter from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard.)

  1. Identify the thing you want students to learn.

Example: five steps of the scientific method

  1. Pinpoint the level of knowledge desired (using Bloom’s or another learning taxonomy). 

The level of learning directly influences the type of assessment you’ll choose. In our example of the scientific method, asking students to apply the steps would be a higher level, and a different assessment task, than asking them to name the steps.

  1. Identify a verb that describes the behavior students will demonstrate. (It’s gotta be observable/measurable. Understand or know are not observable.)

If you’re getting fancy, you’ll also identify the conditions under which the skill or behavior is to be performed: 

And getting extra fancy, you’ll include the criteria used to measure performance. So, putting it all together using our example, you might end up with: The student will use the scientific method to perform an experiment in their daily life with a rubric rating of 85/100. (And then you’d craft the grading rubric.)

There you have it—the why and the how of writing meaningful learning objectives. Though often considered a pro forma aspect of course design, when used properly as part of a backward design approach, learning objectives are truly the backbone of student learning.

Dig Deeper with Professional Development from @ONE

Are you feeling inspired and ready to learn more about improving the design of your online course? @ONE has you covered. Consider the array of professional development opportunities below.

Teaching Matters

Professional development plays a critical role in improving the teaching and learning environments of the diverse students we serve in the California Community College system. To put it plainly: teaching matters -- face-to-face and online. Nearly all (96%) of college students who entered a STEM major and chose to leave (either drop out of college or enter a different major) cited poor teaching and learning experiences as a reason (Seymour & Hunter, 2020). Black and Latinx STEM major “switchers” were more likely (88% to 79%) to cite the competitive culture of STEM courses as an influence in their decision to change majors. While STEM courses serve as a microcosm of inequity in U.S. higher education, the problems cited by STEM students are not restricted to those disciplines alone. 

White and Asian students comprise less than 30% of the roughly 2.1 million students served by California community colleges. However, they are most likely to succeed in our courses, regardless of modality. Improving teaching and learning is an opportunity to advance equity in California. Our mindsets about race and ethnicity; knowledge about and appreciation for the rich, varied experiences our students bring to our classes; and our understanding of how to apply equitable teaching practices in our courses on-campus and online are integral to improving the lives of our students, the diversity of our state’s workforce, and the future of our country. 

Connecting PD with Equity at the College Level

For decades, online courses have increased access to college for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, and now they have also proven to be the resilient backbone of higher education. As we reflect on the past difficult six months of unexpected disruption brought on by COVID-19 and piqued racial injustice in our communities and across the country, I suspect that each educator reading these words can recognize why continuously improving our teaching and learning practices and being compensated for one’s time are so vital. 

From my experiences, many faculty, particularly those who are part-time, can be unaware for years, even decades, about how or if professional development can be used to increase their salary. Sierra College, driven by a systemic effort to improve equity, has made efforts to help faculty navigate this process. One of the changes Sierra made was to get the low-cost online professional development courses offered through @ONE and CVC-OEI and funded by the CCC Chancellor’s Office pre-approved by their Faculty Employees Reclassification Committee (FERC) and create a clear list of those courses, along with their locally-offered workshops and other off-campus opportunities. 

@ONE and You

Thank you, @ONE. Your course has opened my eyes to the power and potential of online instruction. The tools and knowledge are priceless and will not only bring our departments' program to another level, but accelerate its success, and . . . most importantly, that of our students! - Petra Maria, Laney College

@ONE’s nationally recognized online professional development courses serve the needs of thousands of CCC faculty and staff each year. They are facilitated by CCC educators; model and foster Culturally Responsive Teaching pedagogy, accessibility, and Universal Design for Learning principles; and are available to all CCC faculty and staff at a low cost. @ONE courses can be taken a la carte or stacked to earn a certificate in Online Teaching & Design

Many colleges in our system include @ONE courses in their locally-approved online teaching preparation process. Check with your college’s professional development coordinator or distance education coordinator to learn more. If you have a story to share about how @ONE helped improve your teaching, we’d love to hear from you in a comment below!

References:

Riegle-Crumb, C., King, B., and Irizarry, Y. (2019). Does STEM stand out? Examining racial/ethnic gaps in persistence across postsecondary fields. Educ. Res. 48, 133-144.

Seymour, E. & Hunter, E. B. (Eds.). (2020). Talking about leaving revisited: Persistence, relocation, and loss in undergraduate STEM education. Springer.

Starting with Accessibility: Reflections from an Online Math Instructor

Image by Денис Марчук from Pixabay

Accessibility is an important part of teaching online and, at times, it can benefit students, as well as faculty.  Early on in my career at MiraCosta, I recall watching a colleague photocopy problems out of the book, cut the problems from printed pages with scissors, and tape them to a new piece of paper to create the problems. He would make a handwritten note or use whiteout to modify a problem. He had files of these tests in his office - decades worth. But he never used the same test twice and this process would continue every term. His process was time consuming and, at times, frustrating to students who struggled to read the problems. Imagine being able to save your own time and help students too! 

Most faculty use typed exams but may not spend time thinking about how these materials create challenges for some students. While it is common for math instructors to spend time adjusting font size, making itemized lists for parts of a problem, and producing handouts to increase understanding, it is less common that we think about students who rely on screen readers, accessible technology devices used by people with vision impairments.  

Many faculty also make videos for their students, even short videos like the one above. If posted to YouTube, the captions are created automatically – but be careful! Those captions are pretty good, but aren’t perfect. Imagine a video where you described a new algorithm for “sub track shin” or “Polly know meals”. If you’re a math teacher, the intent was ‘subtraction’ and ‘polynomials’ but those misconceptions will confuse students who are following the automatic captions. It is time well spent for all students to update the captions by adding punctuation, capitalization, and fixing these incorrect translations.  Learn how to edit your YouTube captions for accuracy (a 7-minute video by Katie Palacios). 

Making Accessibility Part of Your Course Content Workflow

In the video embedded above, which is just over 200 seconds, I share some quick tips to save you time while making documents, PDFs, or Canvas pages accessible to students who use screen readers. It takes a lot less time to format pages with lists automatically rather than typing them manually. I will also show how following accessibility guidelines helped when a student who was blind needed a Braille version of the course materials. We were able to provide this quickly and without much additional work (it even included Braille graphs) because the content was made with accessibility guidelines in mind.