Learning Outcomes: Your Roadmap to Success in Instructional Design
Imagine that you’re about to take a summer road trip to a new destination, but you’re unsure of how to get there. To prepare for your trip, you’ll likely program the destination into your GPS, pick up a map, or spend some time online reviewing the directions for how to get there. Maybe you’ll do all these things. The key thing to point out is that you probably won’t just start driving and hope that you’ll reach your destination. You need to pre pareto ensure that your trip will be a success.
Creating learning outcomes before you embark on the journey of designing a learning experience is very similar to ensuring that you have a roadmap for a trip.
Image Description: A map with roads and streets. A route is shown in orange with a geo-pin indicating a destination along the route.Source: iStock
Crafting strong and relevant learning outcomes will ensure that you have a roadmap for your course. Learning outcomes outline the skills and knowledge that you expect learners to achieve, as well as the content that you expect to be covered in your course. Without learning outcomes, you risk having irrelevant information in your course, or you may not have the right information you need to design learning assessments and activities.
Learning outcomes are not only beneficial for you in creating your course, but they are also essential for your learners. When we create strong and relevant learning outcomes, our learners know what to expect from the course, and it helps them determine if the course is right for them. They get a clear picture of the goals of the course or program, and they know what skills and knowledge they will achieve by the end of the course.
Creating learning outcomes doesn’t have to be a difficult or time-consuming task.
In fact, I would say it is better to craft clear and simple outcomes that get directly to the point of what you want learners to learn.
Image Description: A young woman with light skin sitting at a table. She has a smart tablet open in front of her as well as a notepad in which she is taking notes. There is an open clipboard to her left.
Source: iStock
Ensure that you use measurable verbs in your learning outcomes. I like this Bloom’s taxonomy example, and I refer to it whenever I am writing new learning outcomes.
One of the great things about Bloom’s taxonomy is that the verbs correlate to the complexity of the learning.
Description: The first page of Utica College’s document of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Measurable Verbs. There is a paragraph of text describing Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy, and then six columns of verbs organized by complexity of learning from Knowledge to Evaluation. Visit the source link to learn more.
Source: Utica College. (n.d.). Bloom’s Taxonomy of Measurable Verbs [PDF]. https://www.utica.edu/academic/Assessment/new/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20-%20Best.pdf
To create a learning outcome based on learners acquiring a skill or knowledge, simply use this pattern:
By the end of this course, learners will be able to (insert verb and skill/task here).
Let’s say that I want learners to be able to learn the skill of how to properly plant a tree seedling. In this instance, I may create the following learning outcome using the synthesis column of Bloom’s taxonomy:
By the end of this course, learners will be able to arrange the steps of planting a tree seedling.
If I want learners to be able to identify five different types of tree seedlings, I will use a verb that relates more to the knowledge or comprehension columns of Bloom’s taxonomy. For example, my outcome may be something like:
By the end of this course, learners will be able to recall the names of five different types of tree seedlings.
Once I’ve created all my learning outcomes for a course, I continue to reference them as I create the content, assessments, and activities to ensure that everything is aligned.
In short, learning outcomes are essential tools to ensure that the roadmap of your course will be a success for you and your learners!
Source: Utica College. (n.d.). Bloom’s Taxonomy of Measurable Verbs [PDF]. https://www.utica.edu/academic/Assessment/new/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20-%20Best.pdf
