Although every college should have a mission, and every class a series of desired outcomes, I sometimes feel that the way learning objectives are utilized can stultify a course: sometimes they lead to boggy syllabi (or other documents) brimming with academic jargon; at others, they dogmatically drive a course's direction and ultimately imply that when the class is over, the objectives have been actualized and "done with," rather than part of an on-going process of development. Outcomes should be measurable and quantifiable, but I'm not convinced they can be measured with accuracy by anyone other than the students themselves (ergo, the use of teaching evaluations).

But I forget that at root, objectives are a hueristic for educational design, which can be traced back to (among other things) Benjamin Bloom's classic taxonomy of educational objectives. Gunter Krumme provides a wonderful overview of Bloom's taxonomy along with a compilation of online sources in regards to it. KSU offers good guidelines for writing learning outcomes based on Bloom. Another article from Lee Shuhlman at the Carnegie Foundation outlines the institutional history of Bloom's taxonomy, while developing a new "table for learning." And Lorin Anderson (et. al) developed a new revision of Bloom's Taxonomy which has made a large impact on how teachers design course objectives.

Although the pressure to design a course with measurable outcomes can seem like a cold mechanism for measuring teaching performance and student learning, the objective of objectives should not be to bureaucratically satisfy an institution's administration or assuage the needs of an outside evaluator. So long as the student's learning remains at the center, objectives can do what they're meant to: send a student into a learning trajectory that may or may not end up where the syllabi suggests.

You can ping this entry by using .