How to Choose Effective eLearning - Part 2

Objectives are the building blocks used by instructional designers to build courses. But how useful are they to someone evaluating the potential of a training course?

Firstly, where do objectives come from? Training courses are often developed using the ADDIE process – Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. The output of the Analysis phase is a set of objectives. Some training organisations publish these objectives but if they don’t, most will provide them on request. If they can’t, then I’d avoid that provider anyway.

Objectives are often split into terminal objectives and enabling objectives. Terminal objectives outline the overall objective for the piece of learning, while enabling objectives are the discrete stages required to complete the training. For example, a terminal objective might be: “At the end of the 60-minute lesson, a student will be able to make Marmite on toast”, while an enabling objective might be: “At the end of this 5-minute activity, a student will be able to apply Marmite to toast in the appropriate proportions.” By the way, if you’ve never had Marmite, it is spread very thinly!

Terminal objectives should map to a discrete piece of learning around a single skill. In the above example, making Marmite on toast was our skill. It might be that the whole course was about making breakfast. I like to use the terms section and topic. A section maps to a terminal objective; a topic to an enabling objective. Multiple sections can then make up a course. Some providers use course, module, lesson and topic, where lesson and topic map to terminal and enabling objectives. How we label discrete pieces of learning doesn’t matter – what is important is the fact that learning is broken down. Courses and modules will likely have more high-level objectives, too, but the important stuff is lower down.

One of the bonuses of designing training this way is if every terminal objective is a discrete skill, then learning can be served up both individually and as part of a course. Creating flexible training that can be customised like a pick-n-mix is both cheaper and faster, than developing something bespoke or specific.

A learning product with good objectives doesn’t guarantee a good product, but a learning product with poorly written objectives, or no objectives at all, certainly guarantees a poor one. While I have seen some learning material over the years with clearly written objectives but poor content, good objectives do usually indicate a quality product.

So now you might ask, what makes a “good” objective? You may already be familiar with the concept of SMART objectives. SMART, or Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound objectives don’t just apply to learning but to all kinds of goal setting.

Specific

If we look again at my Marmite-on-toast objective examples above, both could be more specific. There are assumptions the learner could make such as, the use of a toaster and not an open fire, for example. Terminal objectives tend not to be as specific the enabling objectives underneath. You also don’t want objectives to be too long or complicated. Ask yourself – do the objectives clearly explain what particular skill a student will gain by completing the training? Does this match the needs of your students?

Measurable

A measurable objective is especially important. If you can’t measure if an objective has been met, then you can’t determine how effective training has been. You can also use objectives to create better questions to ask students after training is completed that are specific to the course rather than the traditional ‘happy sheet’. While happy students is a good thing, I’d rather know if they acquired the intended skills and have been able to apply them successfully in their jobs. While we are on the subject, asking students to evaluate training only at the end of a course is not nearly as useful as asking them a few months later. For training to be effective, it has to be retained and used.

Achievable, Realistic, Time bound

While specific and measurable tend to be the aspects missing in most objectives, achievable, realistic and time bound are also important. Almost all courses have some sort of time associated with them, even self-study courses give you an idea of how long it is expected to take to complete them. However, the question here is whether the skills you are expecting people to acquire are attainable, and if it is realistic to achieve them in the time given? How attainable and realistic a skill is will also depend on the prerequisites for the learning. Learning to fly the latest helicopter model within a day may be feasible if you can already fly the older model, but for someone who has never flown, it would be a different story.

It’s worth noting that almost all training objectives start with “At the end of the X-minute lab/topic/section, a student will be able to…” but often this preamble isn’t written down.

Without the preamble, most objectives also start with an action verb such as describe, configure, analyse. These words can also help us determine the level of the learning intended using a model called Blooms Taxonomy. Blooms Taxonomy has six levels of learning: remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating. Each level includes action verbs used in common objectives, which makes it easy to identify what level the training is aimed at. For example, “describe the ingredients of Marmite” is a much easier than “analyse the contents of Marmite”. Using Blooms Taxonomy for objective writing and question writing is perhaps a topic for another article.