No one likes to read learning objectives.  Okay, this might be too extreme a statement.  Let me rephrase to make it sound more academically correct: no one, other than instructional designers, academic creditors, faculty/syllabus-writers, or students who are bored to tears, likes to read learning objectives—unless they are short, punchy, and, hence, super retainable! 

As an instructional-design professional, I fit into the category of learning-objectives reviewers.  I have a tendency to browse through the objectives portion of various documents: course syllabi, training brochures, webinar announcements, and even activity notices from my kids’ school.  I look at them not to learn purpose of the events but rather to catch “violators” of our learning-objective rules:  “to understand”… vague word; “to improve” … but how; “to be able to” … under what condition!

The latest “violator” that I encountered was Dr. David Allbritton, from DePaul’s psychology department.  A few weeks ago, he gave a presentation at an online-learning seminar, where he shared the learning objectives of his online psychology course, and it looked like this:

• Think like a scientist
• Know stuff
• Figure stuff out
• Feel connected
• Find it relevant
• Don’t cheat

Maybe this was just an abbreviated list of objectives for the sake of a presentation (with the audience being psychology amateurs), but wow, talk about violations worthy of ticketing and fines! My need for a rewrite became so compelling that within a minute, new objectives showed up in my mind:

Now tell me which one you like, mine or his?  Or, to phrase it in a different way, which one is easier to comprehend and to remember?

As an audience of a presentation, I must say that I like Dr. Allbritton’s objectives, which grabbed my attention right away with his “stuff.”   And hey, isn’t “gain attention” the very first step of Gagne’s “Nine Events of Instruction”?   Okay, his second one is “inform learners of objectives”, but if your handout, syllabus, or presentation doesn’t allow you the space or time to “holler,” wouldn’t it be nice to use your objectives as an attention grabber?  If the magazines are doing it (e.g. “Lose 10 Pound in a Day,” a suspicious but nevertheless clear and straightforward objective) and the book publishers are doing it (e.g. How to Cook Everything, an ambitious objective embedded even in the title itself), why can’t an academic learning guide, such as a syllabus, be made as easy to grasp as they are?   I am not talking about an effort to commercialize or “sexy up” our academic lingo for the sake of sensationalism.  Because often, it doesn’t need that.  Being straightforward is all it takes to win the bid.  Simple expressions, such as to know, to apply, to become, to evaluate, and to change tells students exactly what to expect from the course, from the fundamental or theoretical (to know) to the practical or methodological (to apply) to the ideological or believed (to become or to think like).

Having gained my attention and that of the rest of the audience, Dr. Allbritton was able to further explain the strategies he used to ensure the achievement of each target in the same simple and direct way.  As someone who’s used to seeing and giving presentations in multislide mode, I found the following one-page handout of his demonstrated, in a clean and clear fashion, a great way of matching instructional strategies with learning objectives: