Something on learning objectives...

I've encountered a few interesting feeds on learning objectives in my reading list, and I thought I'd combine them in this post.

The first one is from Will Thalheimer. He explains in this (long but well done and occasionally fun) video the research behind learning objectives.


Some of the points he makes (or at least what I remember):

• We are talking here about 'focus objectives' more than 'learning objectives' because that's what objectives really to do learners: they make the focus more clear. Will points out that objectives are not the only way to focus the attention of the learner, just one of the techniques.
• The good: when the objective is well formulated (and people can relate to it from their context), the learning impact of what the objectives focuses on goes up.
• The bad: but be aware that the learning of whatever you are not focusing on in the objectives goes down.
• The indifferent: words like 'understand' do not stand out or impact learners really, so use them all you like (or not)

Another resource is the newly launched Learning Objective Maker by EasyGenerator. EasyGenerator is a rapid learning authoring tool that as a method insists on creating learning objectives before you can do anything else (if there are no reasons for learning, there should be learning courses created...). Now they made that part of their tool available for free as the Learning Objective Maker.

The tool isn't rocket science, but helps you in a streamlined process to think through your audience, skill/performance, task, conditions, level and meta-data.