Speaker 1: Greetings. Welcome to Teaching with Blackboard's online learning module number seven, Writing Measurable Outcomes. My name is Sue Baker. I'm a professor in the Information Technology and Computer Science department here at Lakeland and I will be leading you through this online learning experience. Before continuing with this presentation, make sure that you have or are somewhat familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy and have printed the two handouts that are listed on the first page of the module. You can stop the presentation anytime and come back at a later time if you need to. The website that I've placed on that opening page will give you a little bit of background in Bloom's Taxonomy and hopefully make the rest of this learning module make a little more sense to you. Okay, so for this particular module we will hopefully, by the time you're all done, you'll be able to summarize the role of learning outcomes, instruction and online courses. We want you to be able to recognize the different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and be able to select the appropriate verbs that map to your course's instructional objectives. We want to make sure that you're able to construct learning outcomes and we want you to be able to describe a learning activity and include relevant measurable outcomes, basically mapping or aligning outcomes with particular learning activities. So basically, designing an online course requires alignment of assignments, activities and assessment with measurable learning outcomes. Today we're going to really learn how to write measurable learning outcomes using Bloom's Taxonomy and how to align those learning outcomes with online course activities and assignments. I first want to take a couple of seconds here and talk a little bit about online course development. Most instructional design models, as far as the design and development online courses, follow a method that people refer to as ADDIE. This course development method goes through a series of phases. Analysis phase, understanding exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish with the course. The design phase, designing and creating course learning outcomes. In the design phase, in addition to designing those learning outcomes, aligning those learning outcomes with appropriate activities and assessments. The development phase is actually when we go through and start creating the online course in whatever learning management system you might be using. Here at Lakeland we use Blackboard. And then the implementation phase, when the course is actually live. And the evaluation phase. The evaluation phase is done at the end of every course by the students. And here at Lakeland we also have a way to review courses, online courses, before they even hit that implementation or evaluation phase known as quality matters. So it's primarily in that design phase that the creation of learning outcomes come into play. So what are learning outcomes? Why are they important? Well, basically learning outcomes are statements that describe what the learners will be able to do upon completion of a unit of instruction or of a course. They're sometimes referred to as instructional objectives, behavioral objectives, performance objectives, or learning objectives. But basically creating learning outcomes is an essential step in designing instruction of any kind. Since they describe exactly what learners will be able to do, the outcomes help define the scope of an online course and help guide us through the development of the instructional content. Learning activities and assessment activities should also be developed directly from these learning outcomes to ensure that the activities are properly focused on what learners are meant to take away. Learning outcomes also play an important role after the instruction has been designed. They communicate the goals of the instruction to instructors and learners, allowing them to focus their attention and energy accordingly. Although the planned learning goals do not need to be altered necessarily for delivery via distance education, new instructional design strategies may be needed to support the intended outcomes. The use of specific and measurable learning outcomes both guide designers during course development and basically aid learners in the learning process. So how do we go about writing learning objectives or learning outcomes? Basically, learning outcomes need to include at least these four items. First thing you need to specify when you're developing a learning outcome is who's the audience. Is it the learner, the student? That's typically who the audience is. And the performance piece is the key piece here, what learners will be able to do after instruction. It's really the meat of the instructional outcome. This part of the objective should contain a verb that clearly communicates the skills that the learner will perform, like write, locate, define, identify, repair, etc. In a couple of minutes we're going to take a quick peek at Bloom's taxonomy verbs that can be used to assist you in writing this performance criteria. And then if there's any specific condition under which the learner should demonstrate a particular skill, that should be also stated in the learning outcome. The condition can specify resource materials needed, like a calculator, toolbox, information, a lecture, and basically help control the complexity of the task. For example, given a list of ten elements, they need to be able to identify those elements that are metals. That would be the condition, the list of ten elements is that condition. And then lastly, the success criteria. Basically, learning outcomes should include criteria that define acceptable performance. When is it appropriate to do so? 100% accuracy, 80% of the time. This is just another opportunity to make sure that your learning objectives are clearly communicating the intent to learners and instructors. Really, again, just being able to let the student know what needs to be done in order to get the grade they're looking for in the class. So one of the hardest things I think that people have in terms of doing or creating learning outcomes is, well first of all, they have to be measurable. In order to be measurable, sometimes it's or not sometimes, it's recommended that you try to use action verbs, things that again can be measurable. And as you read in the pre-reading for this module, Bloom's Taxonomy is a perfect way to do this. You've got a couple of handouts. One is Bloom's verb wheel and the other is an example, a table, just giving you examples of verbs, objectives, activities, and assessments. But basically what the whole theory behind Bloom's Taxonomy is that they've divided cognition into categories of increasing complexity. So these categories range from knowledge all the way up through evaluation. So the different categories are knowledge, comprehension, application analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. And if you look at Bloom's wheel or even the handout, the example table, you'll note that the levels get increasingly more challenging as we go up in, as we go through the levels. The first level being knowledge, which typically is memorization, recognition, recall of facts. Comprehension is understanding what the facts mean. Application is the correct use of the facts, the rules, or the ideas. Analysis is breaking down the information into component parts. Synthesis, combining those parts to make a new whole. And evaluation, judging the value or worth of information or ideas. And within each one of these categories are samples of verbs that you might use in your learning objective. So in the knowledge category, for example, some verb samples might include describe, tell, show, list. In the comprehensive category, verbs can, examples of verbs would be explain, interpret, outline, predict, distinguish. In the analysis category, classify, compare, contrast, separate, differentiate. So this Bloom's wheel handout that I put out on the course site for you should help as you are creating, or in this case during the activities that we're about to do, rewriting learning objectives. So here's some examples of some measurable learning outcomes. First one, students, there's the audience, will be able to create an embedded chart. Create is that verb that we're talking about. Within an Excel workbook from Excel data, there's the condition. So we've got the audience, the performance, what they need to do to create an embedded chart, and the condition within an Excel workbook from Excel data. Another example, given a list of ten elements, there's the condition. Students will be able, students are the audience, to identify those elements that are metal. So identify is the performance. And lastly, students will be able to articulate cultural and socioeconomic differences and the significance of these differences for instructional planning. Again, we've got an audience, we've got a performance. These outcomes are measurable. You could take these outcomes, create an activity, and assess the students learning. So in order to give you a chance to practice what we've just gone over, we're going to do the next step of the learning module, is you're going to complete a little assignment. It's called Module 7 Assignment. It's rewriting some learning outcomes that really aren't measurable. So you'll be rewriting four learning outcomes into measurable learning outcomes. Once you're done with that, we'll meet back up again for Part 2 of the learning module. Enjoy.