Unpopular Position post no 179

Rick Jabos writes on LinkedIn,

Here here. I’ve written about this story before, but it’s been one I can reliably reach back to about the work we do as IDs. Many years ago a friend of a friend of mine worked at an education company and one evening we were at the same event. We worked on related projects and they came to me this evening and said something that went like this. “JR, I was doing instructional design today. I spent my morning writing learning objectives. ‘By the end of this module students should be able to… (gestures as if reading a list in the air in front of them, representing a screen) describe…” (I forget the rest, maybe because I was internally blowing a gasket).

I share the observation here that verbs like explain, discuss, describe, etc. appear everywhere in elearning (and beyond) and by the time you get to trying to recall, apply, or integrate new knowledge those actions are no where to be seen. Beyond what Rick identifies here as a training of IDs problem, what I notice is that there is little reflection happening in many cases as to what we’re actually trying to do with objectives. Insert ‘best practices’ rant here – many times folks creating elearning/training will create objectives from thin air, and do so mostly because it’s a “best practice” to have objectives. Authoring tools even reinforce this. The most popular authoring tool just released an AI feature and one of the demos is using GenAI to create your learning objectives. Buddy, if you’re that far into it that you’ve got the tool open and you haven’t thought about the objectives of what you’re about to build then AI is not going to help you. Oooh Shiny I suppose. And it’s BEST PRACTICE!

The other trap I see folks fall into, which I think sits underneath the specific verbs Rick mentioned is that the designers/developers write it from a course materials perspective, instead of the learner perspective. That is, even though the statement says, “…students should be able to…” the bullet point objectives that follow are better described as “…I (the content/instructor) will talk about…” So then we get softer objectives that look like objectives, quack like objectives, but are not student learning objectives. “By the end of this module you should be able to explain x y z” is the claim, but what’s often more accurate is “this module is an attempt to explain to you x y z”. Next time you take a training or elearning, consider this flip of phrase and see if I’m right or not. Discuss would be along the lines of “during this class, I plan to discuss x y z”. There is a rigidity that comes with writing Bloom’s style objectives that I don’t think reflects the work and deflects agency from designers to engage with the work.

Heidi Kirbi followed up on the post with a nice short blog that talks about performance objectives, connecting Mager style objectives “action, condition, criteria” with Bloom’s taxonomy, including the two overlooked domains, affective and psychomotor. One thing you’ll notice there is that learning objectives are very specific and quite lengthy. Even educationalists would shoot down the example Heidi provides in putting it all together. It’s a well-articulated objective, “Leaders at X company will be able to recall the review process and incorporate it into their work, using the process to compose fair, thorough reviews for each of their employees at the end of the year.” but it doesn’t fit what is commonly trotted out as Bloom style objectives. Trying to be more articulate in this way can be outright rejected using thought terminating cliches by folks who should know better.

So, what can we do? Getting IDs and educationalists to write ABCD or Mager style objectives overnight isn’t going to happen. One useful thing I encountered early in my career what a table, not just as verbs (I think the verb only cheat sheets are part of the problem), but also included verb definitions and examples. I don’t have it on hand, but say for “identify” it said in the next cell, “to recognize and name”. Next to that was a sample objective (still in an actual Bloom’s style), followed by an assessment example. As a young ID this was invaluable because I could really articulate what I was trying to get at with each verb I chose. It allowed me to get on the same page as my colleagues and SMEs as to what we were trying to get learners to do, instead of talking past each other, using the same verb, but not realizing we understood the verb differently. Books on writing learning objectives do this deep work, but that obviously only helps some. Job-aids to replace old verb lists with something like this might be a significant first step to doing better.