2A: Establishing Goals

"If you don't know where you're going, you might wind up someplace else." - Yogi Berra

The first and most important step in good course design is establishing what you want students to learn in the course. Although some instructors overlook learning outcomes as "just something you have to put on your syllabus", effective learning outcome statements can have large benefits for both students and faculty:

• They can help students understand what is expected of them and provide important guidance toward success [recall that transparency is a key characteristic of the effective and inclusive classroom];
• The process of developing those outcome statements can also help instructors think more deeply and consciously about what they are really hoping to accomplish;
• Once a clear destination has been established, charting an effective journey to reach that destination becomes much easier. 

In this module, we will explore the characteristics of effective learning outcomes, work on developing effective learning outcomes for our specific courses, and dissect out the knowledge and skills necessary for students to actually achieve those outcomes. 

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this module, you will be able to clarify learning goals. Specifically, you should be able to:

• Write specific, assessable course learning outcome statements (CLOs)
• Identify the domain and developmental level of each CLO

Activities

In this module you will:

• Reflect on your goals for your course
• Learn two taxonomies for types of learning
• Learn the characteristics of effective learning outcome statements
• Draft / revise your learning outcomes to be specific and assessable