10 reasons: Why we need to kill boring ‘learning objectives’!

At the end of this course you will…  zzzzzzzzz…….
How to kill learning before it has even started. Imagine if every movie started with a list of objectives; “in this film you will watch the process of a ship sail from Southampton, witness the catastrophic effect of icebergs on shipping, witness death at sea but understand that romance will be provided to keep you engaged”. Imagine Abraham Lincoln listing his objectives before delivering the Gettysburg Address. Does anyone ever say, sorry, I thought this course was about something else, and walk out? Never.

1. Why do dull text on opening?
When dealing with learners who need to be motivated, excited and hooked, where attention matters, why prescribe a screenful of boring 'trainer' text as your starting point. This makes no sense, especially online, where first impressions really do matter.

2. Gagne misapplied
There’s always a villain and in this case it’s Gagne. To be fair this wasn't entirely his fault. ‘Stating the objectives’ was the second in his nine steps of instruction. Unfortunately few remember that the first step was ‘Gaining attention’ THEN ‘Stating objectives’. Most start by stating objectives putting the second step first. In any case, I have serious doubts about including the second step at all. Indeed, this nine-step approach, as I have previously stated, tends to produce formulaic, often uninspiring and over-long courses.

3. Over prescriptive

We know that people make very quick judgments of other people, often in a matter of seconds, and if you as a teacher/trainer are forced to do this prescriptive, unnatural act before you get a chance to put yourself across as an expert, practitioner and teacher, you will have got off to the worst possible start. To force teachers, trainers and lecturers to state learning objectives at the start of every session is to be over-prescriptive. It almost suggests a lack of critical thought and learning. You WILL learn this... come what may!

3. Teacher-Speak

Anyone who knows anything about speaking, writing for TV or film, designing web sites or games or any form of content that needs to keep an audience engaged, knows that immediate engagement matters. If those first impressions are a bureaucratic list of objectives, framed in teacher or training-speak, you’ll have set the wrong, dull tone. It is a behaviourist approach at odds with what we know about motivation, engagement and attention.

4. Attention killer

Arousal or attention is a necessray condition for learning. Arouse people at the start and they will remember more. Yet if the first experience many learners have is a detailed registration procedure followed by a dull list of learning objectives, attention is more likely to fall than rise. There is a strong argument for emotional engagement at the start of the learning experience, not a jargon-like list of objectives. Attention is a necessary condition for learning. To kill attention is to kill learning.

5. Little learning a dangerous thing

Even if this were a good practice, it is not easy and few have the experience to write objectives well. They end up being short and imprecise lists full of fuzzy terms such as ‘understand’, ‘know’, ‘learn’,  ‘be aware of’, ‘appreciate’ and so on. Writing a good objective in terms of actual performance, with the pre-requisite conditions (tools, conditions, presumptions), actual performance in terms of what the learners will know or be able to do and the measurable criterion such as time and so on, is not easy.

6. Time wasted

How much time is currently wasted by teachers and designers thinking about writing and delivering learning objectives. Even worse, how much learners’ time is wasted reading them. Even worse, how much attention and motivation is lost in learners by being made to sit through this bureaucratic stuff? My guess, especially if teachers, lecturers, instructors and trainers do this at the start of every lesson, lecture or module, that the waste is in the many, many millions.

7. Better to Top and tail

Rather than state learning objectives, we’d be much better focusing on productive techniques that focus on improved retention. For example, to ‘top and tail’ lectures, modules etc. so that reinforcement of learning takes place through spaced-practice. Remind people at the start of what they learned last time and at the end repeat - this form of reinforcement works.

9. Student signalling
One excuse is that learning objectives allow the student to see what they're in for and provides goals. Yet how many learners, read the objectives and say 'not for me, I'm out of here'? People on courses are there to stay. And if you really want to state goals, phrase those goals in terms or real goals personal to the learners - the exam, promotion, reputation. One could argue that it provides focus and much was made of one paper by Rothkopf in 1975. However, hard on its heels came Kibler 1976, Melton 1978, Lewis 1981, Hamilton 1986 and Ho 1985, who showed the downsides. Learning is cocomplex , sometimes attitudinal and rarely captured by often bad learning objectives.

10. Over-prescriptive behaviourism

It is important that teachers come across in a way that they feel comfortable with. Education and training has a habit of using theory, in this case 50-year-old theory, that simply refuses to budge and gets fossilized into prescriptive rules that constrict teaching and learning. The problem with this older theory is that it came when both the theorists and teacher-training world was dominated by behaviourism. It’s time we moved on.

Conclusion
Note that I’m not criticising the use of learning objectives or learning outcomes, as defined by Mager, in the design of courses. That is a skill and practice that is far too often absent in learning professionals. My arguments focus on boring learning objectives made explicit to learners at the start of a course. There is nothing wrong with bringing focus to learning but simply shoving a list up front does, in most cases, the opposite. In truth these are old behaviourist fossils, deeply rooted in the behaviourist era. We need to move on.