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Marc My Words: Why I Hate Instructional Objectives

July 10, 2012
“Ask yourself this: when was the last time a C-level executive in your organization asked anything about what the instructional objectives are for your training programs? “

Okay, I don’t really hate instructional objectives, but I can’t help wondering if we are overusing them, perhaps for the wrong purposes. Ever since Bob Mager popularized instructional objectives more than 40 years ago in his classic book, Preparing Instructional Objectives, they have become part of the Holy Grail for instructional designers and the training industry.

Be they enabling or terminal; cognitive, affective, or psychomotor; normative or summative; or behavioral, instructional, or performance objectives, no course is worthy without a host of statements that explain, sometimes in excruciating detail, what the student will be able to do after the instruction is completed. But are instructional objectives as valuable as we think they are?

The ABC’s (and D’s) of objectives: Do they really matter?

We’ve all had driven into us the mantra that objectives should have four parts: Audience, Behavior, Conditions, and Degree (so-called “A-B-C-D objectives”). Objectives should clearly define the audience (the “A”), describe what the audience will be able to do (the “B”), detail the environment under which the behavior will be demonstrated (the “C”), and state how well the behavior should be demonstrated (“the D”). That’s all well and good, but how much relevance does this have for the student/performer in the real world?

For instructional designers, objectives help a lot. They drive testing and evaluation strategies, they are a checklist of sorts for all the learning activities in the course, and they help us better meet learner needs. Designers can use objectives to better understand how well a course (classroom or online) is performing. Is the audience learning? Do the learning activities work? Are we covering the content adequately?

But do objectives truly help the learners? Even if they do, are they enough? We’ve all been there; sitting in class while the instructor reads (or we view online) any number of statements, sometimes dozens of them, for each lesson or module, that often begin, “at the conclusion of this course, the student will be able to…” Each objective focuses on a specific skill or knowledge taught in the course, but may be too much in the weeds to answer students’ bigger questions like, “Why am I taking this course?” “What’s in it for me?” and “How will this help me down the road?”

One four-hour eLearning course I know had eight lessons with an average of six instructional objectives per lesson. That’s 48 objectives. But when I asked a focus group of students what the value of the course was for them, I got wildly divergent answers and more blank stares than I had hoped.

The value of an advance organizer

It is this sense of value or benefit that seems to be missing from instructional objectives. We advise students well about what they will be doing in class and right afterward, but less well about how the course will help them down the road. This hurts motivation, especially when it comes to applying what they have learned in the real world of work. It also clouds the linkage between courses and organizational goals. Objectives tell you what the course will do, but they don’t tell you how you or the organization will benefit.

That’s why, at the very least, I want to amend the four-part, A-B-C-D objective paradigm with a fifth part: expectations. A-B-C-D-E objectives would require a statement of what the audience will gain from the course and how it will impact their work, competency, and/or career, as well has how it supports the mission and strategies of the organization. With a statement of expectations, students, and the organization will be able to relate what they do in an instructional setting with more meaningful macro success criteria.

Even better would be statements of expectations that can stand alone from the instructional objectives so that we can discuss and update them without necessarily having to go into the minutia of specific training timeframes, tactics, measures, or outcomes. We would generally introduce expectations up front (at the beginning of a course or sometimes at the lesson level), and they become a great advance organizer for what is to come. My eight-lesson, 48-objective online course would have far fewer, but more powerful, expectations statements that we could include in course descriptions and syllabi.

A question of expectations

Here’s a quick checklist of ten “expectations type” questions your learners will be asking (you can probably think of more):

  1. Why am I here?
  2. What will I learn?
  3. Why is this important to me?
  4. How will this benefit my job performance and my career?
  5. How will I use what I learn?
  6. How will my job change because of what I’ve learned?
  7. Why is this important to my organization?
  8. What do I need to be ready?
  9. Will my boss support this training?
  10. What am I supposed to do when I return from training?

So, by all means, keep instructional objectives, but don’t stop there. Add statements of expectations to truly broadcast the value and worthiness of your training efforts.

Heresy!

Still not sure? Ask yourself this: when was the last time a C-level executive in your organization asked anything about what the instructional objectives are for your training programs? Probably never. But they always ask (or should always ask) what the benefits of those programs are – to the business and to the employees. Can you clearly, succinctly, and strategically answer this question?

De-emphasizing instructional objectives may be heresy to some, but to learners, a better balance with expectations and value statements may be welcome indeed.

 


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07/11/2012  8:42 am
by Howard_Solomon

 Thank you Marc!

Besides the expectations, there is further reason to break with the tyranny of writing objectives in all instances. That is that they have always been a training tool. They are particularly inappropriate in the context of liberal arts higher education. There are experiences that are assembled in classes that have the potential to lead someone to simply "be educated." In philosophy class, a student reads Plato's Republic just because it is a good experience to have done so. Literature, art and music appreciation and probably some others lead to changes in outlook that could produce an effect of listening to a jazz musician for an extra 10 minutes while walking to lunch. How would anybody know this while assembling the class? The answer is that they wouldn't.
Mager wrote "Preparing Instructional Objectives" as something that he thought corporate trainers were going to use. But we have made the mistake of pulling it into all educational contexts. We need to stop thinking of life enrichment as something achievable only through the pocketbook. The insistence on measurable objectives where they don’t belong has led far too many teachers to fill in the blanks with contrived measurables that mark such items as fluent repetition of a plot as the outcome of a literature course. Enjoyment of life is what the outcome should be. But we seem to be admonished away from saying so.
07/12/2012  3:24 pm
by kenhub

 Marc, besides the propensity for ISDs to create mundane LOs for the sake of LOs, there are a multitude of sins ISDs make when they limit themselves to staying within the safety net of traditional instructional design. It is for this exact reason we are just now seeing the uptake of informal learning (70-20-10) and the flipped classroom. God forbid we should look deeply into the grand social experiment we call the public school system, which seemed to be a never ending stream of "approved" learning methodologies which inevitably were replaced when the next cycle of "mush" came through.

In the end, each learner is on a journey, where each destination leads them to other destinations (call them objectives or sum them up as goals). In the end, do we have to always describe them blatantly or can we incorporate them into the larger context of the learning material? Probably a combination of the two. But not having them at all is like taking a trip with nowhere to go.
07/12/2012  7:03 pm
by carlsbadmom

 Marc, I like objectives. They give me comfort. More importantly, they give me guidance for content, activities, and tests. Even so, my eyes also glaze over with endless lists of "the learner will list, explain, describe, or state." Some will argue these types of objectives are needed to distinguish between learning objectives (in the classroom) and performance objectives (on the job). I will go for the performance objectives every time. So instead of listing steps of the sales process, I want to learner to perform a sales call following the four steps with some stated criteria (e.g. make a sale). I can sell performance objectives to the learner, who can now see the big picture and what to expect from the training. I can sell the performance objectives to management -- should they ask. So ultimately, I don't think we need an "E" level to the ABCD model; we just to need to extend the ABCDs into the real world where more value and meaning resides.
07/16/2012  12:59 pm
by robinsr

 Just like any tool, LO's can be abused and mis-used if not well understood. My experience is that they are helpful - if correctly written - to do two things and both of them are more for corporate instructional designers' uses, not for C-level or learners. One is to ensure that learning outcomes are optimally aligned with business objectives and to serve as a blueprint for the development process. Except perhaps for certification training, paraphrasing "Mager-type" objectives for learners is usually sufficient as advance organizers. Just my 2 cents.
07/16/2012  2:10 pm
by teejay

 Great comments, and it's always interesting to read others' points of view.

Two key benefits to learning objectives keep me using them:
1) They focus the training/ learning/ performance intervention. This helps keep the content relevant and within the scope of addressing the business need.
2) They serve as a "filter" of sorts, so potential learners know what they are signing up for in advance, and can self-select if this intervention will or will not meet their needs.
07/16/2012  6:42 pm
by Spence

 Mr Rosenberg you have overstepped the "Marc" here. There is no need to abandon OLs and no need to add the "e" for expectations if performance is the focus of the learning. Most of the useless learning I have seen developed is because there has been a lack of objectives or because the LOs have been poorly written at what David Merrill referred to many years ago as the "remember" level. Merrill's component design theory, not understood or respected enough now, provided the guidelines to write supporting "application" level objectives with obviously one important aim - to focus on "performance". This is still applicable and immensely valuable for formal learning and for most cases when performance support and other informal learning interventions are being framed. let's not loose the underpinnings to performance improvement.
07/23/2012  5:32 pm
by nowalls

 Call them performance objectives, learning objectives, or whatever; good objectives identify what the training is going to accomplish (which is not the same as what the learner will be able to regurgitate at the end of the training). If the outcome doesn't provide value to the learner and/or the organization, why bother with it in the first place.
Coincidentally, a good LO will also answer the question of what the learner can expect to get out of the training.
08/09/2012  11:11 am

 I would suggest that the key to doing LOs effectively is to keep in mind your audience. The design team needs clear, precise, and perhaps formal learning objectives to ensure the training stays on track. But the learner does not need to see behind the curtain. The learner should see LOs (preferably crafted as performance statements) that communicates in "real-work" language how this course will impact their performance. I would agree with a previous post that the "E" is not needed if LOs are written to address the needs of the audience.
08/23/2012  11:12 am
by lori_loberg

 Spot on, Marc.

In many areas of the tech industry, a list of LOs signals to learners that the training department is either out of touch or doesn't have a sense of urgency.
Really, all that's needed is a descriptive title, one sentence to provide further clarity if needed, and a high-level course outline.

During course development, using Learning Outcomes instead of objectives naturally focuses the design on intended behavior change vs just the act of learning something. Outcomes are essential for development, but that's it. They can be included in an appendix if there's a concern that a learner will ask about them.

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