via oldaily,

According to this article, Lumen Learning “has launched the ‘Learning Challenges Leaderboards‘ … as well as RISE and Shine, a community effort to improve the OER.” The leaderboards “provide a fine-grained view into the specific skill-level outcomes students struggle with the most.” RISE and Sine is “a community-based continuous improvement process.” What I find interesting is the vague phrasing of the learning objectives on the leaderboard, using verbs like “explain” and “describe” and “determine” (which at best require a rote response) rather than performance-based objectives, such as “calculate” or “measure” or “model”. Maybe what RISE is measuring is bad learning objectives, not bad learning resources.

This speaks to how varied writing objectives has become. What Stephen identifies as a problem of vague verbs is actually likely a lack of the two other key components of learning objectives: conditions and criteria (note that’s looking at it from a competencies perspective, I have not adopted the SMART objective writing style myself). I’ve seen a lot of this, particularly in higher ed, focus on verbs and Bloom’s taxonomy handouts. Much of the professional development offered on writing objectives ends at the action part and totally misses what makes an objective a clear performance (either the action condition criteria OR SMART formats). Unfortunately the Lumen Learning site appears to be down for the time being so I am unable to verify my hunch.