How to Set Clear and Effective Learning Objectives

In this post, we're going to explore the purpose of learning objectives and develop them for your courses.

One of the keystones of online fashion course creation is the accurate and effective use of learning objectives. Before taking any course creation steps, it's important to figure out your course's learning objectives.

Learning objectives are one of the three components that give your online fashion course its strength. These components are:

1. Objectives that explain the knowledge and skills you want students to acquire by the end of the course.
2. Assessments allow you as the course instructor to check the degree to which the students meet the learning objectives.
3. Instructional Strategies which you design into your course to encourage student engagement towards meeting the objectives.

These three components are interlinked and, therefore, dynamic. Consequently, when you make a change in one, you'll need to double-check to see how it affects the other two components and adjust accordingly.

Start with Learning Objectives

Assuming you have assessed your students' needs and understand what it is that your course should aim to overcome or improve, you should then develop the specific learning objectives for each skill area. 

Work on the learning objectives and then return to the other two components and work to and fro in an iterative process. When you can clearly communicate your learning objectives, then it will help you to choose and organise your course content and determine the appropriate assessments and instructional strategies the course will need.

It also helps the student have clear learning objectives because they can then manage their own progress and know where to focus their efforts to complete the course.  Students who have goals/outcomes/objectives focus on their learning, which leads to more time and energy going to that area of focus. Consequently, they learn faster and more effectively.

Make Your Learning Objectives student-centred.

When we're the subject expert and developing our course, we'll have a general idea of what we want the course to cover, the scope fo the material and specific subjects we will teach. And that's fine to hold these views. We need, after all, a general route map in our minds about how we will tackle the design of our fashion course.

But it's important to make the learning objectives student centred because the course is about what they need to achieve, not what we want to teach. We find it useful to create learning objectives based on a simple sentence.

 "At the end of the course, students should be able to........."

By completing this simple sentence, you'll be able to develop clear learning objectives quickly.

Learning Objectives Should Use Action Verbs

As you map out your options for the learning objectives, keep in mind concrete actions and behaviours you want from your students. This way, student learning becomes explicit and communicates to students what's expected of them intellectually to complete the course.

Sample learning objectives for a math class might be:

One way to measure the degree to which students can do what you expect them to do is to use action verbs. Download this list of action verbs from Bloom's Taxonomy to help you create your learning objectives.

Make Your Learning Objectives Measurable

As we said earlier, your learning objectives are a keystone to the course and link instructional strategies and student assessments. So the learning objectives must be measurable. This often means working at a more detailed level in figuring out these objectives than you feel you need. And that might be a bit tedious, but unless you can measure whether or not the objective has been reached, how will you or your student know if they have achieved it.

Be wary of vague learning objectives such as "understand ABC" or "grasp the principles of XYZ." If you find yourself writing objectives like this for your online fashion course, simply challenge them and drill deeper. Ask yourself what should the student be able to do if they have "grasped the principles of XYZ"? Then build your learning objective from the answer.

Make sure you break down the tasks involved in developing skills to have discrete component skills. For example, simply stating that the student will be able to pattern cut is too broad, so define the tasks involved in pattern cutting and develop discrete learning objectives that will build the component skills to give the broad skill of pattern cutting. This will enable you to select appropriate assessments and instructional strategies so that students practice all component skills.

Build Self-Assessments into Your Courses

Having clearly defined learning objectives enables you to create appropriate assessments for the course. After all, we want to check that our students are learning. But we can also use these objectives to develop a pre-course assessment tool to check pre-existing knowledge and skill. 

At a fundamental level, you can create a chart that asks the student to rate their confidence level against the course topics. The scoring can range from 0 - 01 or very weak through to very strong. Then the student has a baseline assessment of where they are before the course begins and can focus particularly in the areas where they have scored themselves with the lowest level of confidence. This provides then with a tool for self-monitoring as they progress through your course.

According to a report by Carnegie Mellon University

"Students who naturally monitor their own progress and
try to explain to themselves what they are learning along the way generally show greater learning gains as
compared to students who engage less often in self-monitoring and self-explanation activities."

Summary

• OK, remember then the three components that will give your course strength. Objectives, assessments and instructional strategies. 
• Develop your learning objectives first.
• Identify the discrete skill components and develop learning objectives for each.
• Make sure your objectives are student-centred.
• Use action verbs in your objectives - download the document.
• Ensure your objectives are measurable.
• Build-in self-assessments into your courses

Feedback Time

So now it's your turn. Please give feedback in the comments section below about the post. How useful was it? What isn't clear still? What topics would you like covered in future posts? 

We love your comments, so please let us know.

Mark Gregory is the Founder of The Fashion Student Hub, a marketplace for selling online fashion courses. We Teach Fashion teaching fashion subject experts how to create and promote their own online courses, generate revenue and serve the growing need for online education in the fashion sector.