How can faculty design their online courses?
Page 2: Learning Goals
Information on this page was adapted from:
- the Online Course Development Institute from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching (CFT); similar public-facing content from CFT can be found on its Online Course Development Resources site
- Writing Good Learning Outcomes from Indiana University/University of California Davis
The first step in backward design is to identify the specific skills, understandings, and knowledge you expect your students to achieve by the end of the course. Once you have done so, you can determine your:
- Learning (or course) goals — These broad, course-level expectations describe what students will know and be able to do by the end of the course.
- Learning objectives — Derived from the learning goals, objectives detail the specific topic-related skills and knowledge that students will be able to demonstrate at the end of each unit or module.
Think of your course’s learning goals as your destination and its learning objectives as the milestones that keep students on track along the way. Our next table illustrates the relationships between course goals and learning objectives.
Example Course Goals | Example Learning Objectives |
Genetics Students can describe the mechanisms by which an organism’s genome is passed on to the next generation and to predict how the different mechanisms affect the frequency of different types of genetic disorders. |
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Organic Chemistry Students can interpret data to draw conclusions and can relate this process to how the field builds knowledge. |
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(From Cynthia J. Brame, Science Teaching Essentials: Short Guides to Good Practice, 2019.)
Beginning your course design process by identifying such goals goes a long way toward establishing the course’s overall framework. It enables you to plan and organize critical course content. Large or overarching ideas will become course goals. Smaller specific ideas become learning objectives. This process of establishing goals and objectives will also help you narrow your course’s focus. It creates an opportunity to weed out unnecessary details or tangential information and instead focus on critical content. This will simplify the process of aligning content, learning activities, and assessments with course goals.
Tip
When you set about identifying course goals and learning objectives, consider including any standards-related competencies required for your field. For example, many special education training programs adhere to the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Special Educator Professional Preparation Standards for accreditation purposes.
What if you’re developing an online course from a face-to-face version that you’ve taught for years? You already know your course goals. Can you skip this stage of backward design? First, Joe Bandy illuminates some considerations before you do so using an example from Alice in Wonderland: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” [asked Alice]. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. Next, he discusses some things to think about when and if you need to adjust your course goals.
Joe Bandy, PhD
Assistant Director, Center for Teaching
Vanderbilt University
Joe Bandy, PhD
Considerations for developing course goals
Well, I’m often reminded of the Alice in Wonderland dialogue that Alice has with the Cheshire Cat where she says, “Would you tell me which way to go?” And he says, “Well, it depends a good deal on where you want to go.” And she says, “Oh, I don’t much care where.” And he said, “Well, then it doesn’t really matter which way you go.” And she says, “Well, I just wanna get somewhere.” He says. “I’m sure you’re sure to do that as long as you walk long enough.”
I think of that sometimes when I’m talking with instructors about their course goals. It is indeed the case that many instructors know where they want to go with students. They have a good sense of what they want students to know and do by the end of their courses. But too often I see faculty think in very narrow terms about the content of their course and not so much who their students will be and what their students will know or what skills they’ll learn by the end of a course. So unfortunately I think that sets faculty up to think about their courses in terms of coverage—the types of content they’re going to get through, the knowledge that they’re going to share—rather than what kind of skills the students will be building.
So, for instance, in a biology course you could easily say, “My goal is to teach students how to know what the structure of a cell is.” But is that going to teach them the things that biologists really do in their work? Are they going to learn the scientific method? Are they going to think differently about the human body and how it functions and thrives? Maybe. But it’s better to be clear about that and to lay out your goals in a scaffolded way so that maybe you can cover other content as well.
The second problem that I often see is faculty not thinking about what they need to uncover, the types of misunderstandings or misconceptions that students bring about their chosen field into the classroom. The historian Wendell Calder talks about how his students in American history often think of history as just a series of events and not a discipline that focuses on the study of history and how to interpret it differently over time. There’s a lot that has to be uncovered in the way our students know what they think they know but maybe they don’t fully. And we can do that better if we have clarity about where we want our students to be and go and also can help us to be more collaborative and self-reflexive with students about the goals so that they can join in the learning with us. The learning isn’t something we do to them, It’s something they do with us. So the more we can help them to be metacognitive, to think about how to think, and to learn about how to learn then the more progress they will make.
Joe Bandy, PhD
Considerations for adjusting current course goals
First, I think it’s worth acknowledging that faculty who have come up with a fairly focused and clear set of goals may not need to change them as they move online. But we have found that many faculty do want to tweak them. Learning online requires a bit more self-direction and clarity in the minds of students as they encounter the material. And it can be a lot to manage. Working online in multiple courses, it’s a lot sitting in front of your computer all day and Zoom meetings or working through all kinds of tests, and readings can be tiring. Students can lose focus. So the goals and the objectives need to be very clearly outlined so the students can move through them in a more self-aware process and can manage their own progress towards the goals that you’ve set. That means they can manage their assignments and activities better.
Second, it’s going to be stressful for them to keep up with all of this. So they might require goals that are more focused on a less-is-more approach, where faculty focus on the main goals of the course and those that are really secondary or tertiary goals of learning might might be pared down for students in an online environment. I’ve had many faculty go through a backwards design process of developing their goals and they start with those that are foundational, that are going to be more paradigmatic, kind of transformative for student learning. And then secondary goals are really the content that’s required to meet the first goal. And then the third goals are usually those that are just content that faculty hope that their students will be familiar with by the time they leave the course. And I often see faculty paring away or paring down that third-tier of goals, the things that they just hope students will be familiar with. They try to focus very, very closely on the main learning goals. I see faculty jettisoning entire units or some readings that they feel are just not on point with the primary goals of the course.
Writing or Revising Learning Objectives
If you are designing a new course, identify the concepts or skills that you want students to master and then develop your learning goals and objectives. On the other hand, if you are converting a face-to-face course to an online or hybrid course, you probably already have an idea what you would like your students to learn and be able to do. In fact, you may even have already identified the learning goals and objectives for your course. The prompts below can help you write or revise a learning objective.
Digging Deeper: Learning Goals
- How to Assess My Course: Identify Course Learning Outcomes Hunter College
- Bloom’s Taxonomy Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching
- Is it observable and measurable?
- In other words, does the learning objective:
- Describe behavior that you can see?
- Quantify performance in a way that can be observed so that any amount of change can subsequently be evaluated?
- Does the learning objective focus on student action?
- In other words, does the learning objective:
- Follow this format: By the end of the course, students will be able to…[student action] + [focus of the action]?
- For example: Students should be able to diagram the process of meiosis.
- For example: Students should be able to assess a learner’s reading-comprehension level.
- Use verbs such as write, identify, or analyze, which are directly observable or measurable and therefore preferable to more abstract terms like know and understand.
- Use objects or nouns that summarize the desired knowledge or skill that students are expected to achieve.
- Follow this format: By the end of the course, students will be able to…[student action] + [focus of the action]?
- Does the learning objective describe the level of performance?
- In other words, does the learning objective describe what mastery looks like?
Questions adapted from the Indiana University/University of California, Davis, course module series.
Because Adriane Seiffert was teaching a course that she’d never taught before, she had to develop her course goals from scratch. In this interview, she briefly discusses the one change she made to a course goal in order to align with methods she used in an online environment that were different from a face-to-face course (time: 0:59).
Adriane E. Seiffert, PhD
Senior Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor of Psychology
Vanderbilt University
Adriane Seiffert, PhD
When I was thinking about the course, I thought about it differently because of the recommendations from the Center for Teaching—the recommendation to think of the goals first and to develop those fully before going on to think about assessments and then thinking about content and going through those stages was definitely helpful for me. But I found that the course goals that I was creating were still the ones I had in mind from early on, they weren’t different. The only additional thing that I put in as a goal that I didn’t have before was reading the literature by annotating the papers directly.
So we had already a course goal of reading the scientific literature, the published literature, and that we’re still doing. But we’re doing it while looking at it through Perusall so that the PDF is available for all the students to see and they can annotate particular parts of it and we can discuss what the different parts mean as posts on that format.
Example Course Development Plan: Course Goals and Learning Objectives
Now that we’ve discussed course goals and learning objectives, let’s take a moment to look at some examples.
Course Development Plan: Course Goals and Learning Objectives
Activity
Now it’s your turn.
- Using the information and examples on this page, write at least one course goal and a few corresponding learning objectives for a course that you will be teaching. Click here for a blank template you can use for this activity and the activities on subsequent pages. This is only a starting point. Feel free to alter this template to fit the needs of your course.
- Check to see whether each learning objective takes into account the following factors:
- Is it observable and measurable?
- Does it focus on student action?
- Does it describe the level of performance?