Here’s an Easy Way to Create Learning Objectives

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Start with what you want people to do, not what you want them to know

A lot of people learn to build courses by starting with a bullet list of learning objectives. And since many courses aren’t focused on performance goals, the objectives have soft, knowledge-based objectives like this: “Understand the importance of customer service.”

It sounds reasonable. But what does it mean? It’s also almost impossible to design a course around. What does “understand” look like? How do you measure it? What would a learner actually do differently after taking that course?

Most people start with topics and work backward to objectives. That produces knowledge-based objectives that are hard to design for and hard to evaluate. Here are some common objective starters:

• Understand
• Know
• Learn
• Appreciate
• Be aware of
• Become familiar with
• Comprehend
• Recognize

They sound like they mean something, but the goal should be to flip them around to add a measure to the word. For example, “understand” doesn’t mean anything. However, if we asked, how do we know they understand, we can write an objective to that.

Start with the end behavior. Ask what you want someone to do differently after the course. Then write an objective that names that behavior.

The simple formula that makes this easier

A good learning objective has three parts: a verb, a condition, and a standard. You may have seen this before — it comes from Robert Mager’s work on instructional objectives and it holds up well.

• The verb describes the observable behavior. Words like “identify,” “demonstrate,” “apply,” or “resolve” work. Words like “understand,” “appreciate,” or “be aware of” don’t. If you can’t watch someone do it, it’s not a behavior.

• The condition describes the context. Under what circumstances should the learner be able to do this? With reference materials or without? In a supervised setting or independently? On a live system or a simulated one?

• The standard sets the bar. How well and how consistently does the learner need to perform? Every time? Eight out of ten times? Within two minutes?

Thinking through all three forces you to get specific — and specific objectives make course design much easier.

Instead of “understand how to deal with angry customers” your objective becomes:

• Given a simulated customer-service interaction with an angry customer, the learner will apply the company’s de-escalation process to resolve the issue while maintaining a professional tone and following all required service steps.

That objective describes the way to determine understanding and has the ability to measure it. Review it and find the verb, condition, and standard. How does this compare to the objectives in your courses?

Why this matters for e-learning

Performance-based objectives shape what goes into the course. You have a specific goal that can be measured. And once you know what a learner needs to do, you can ask whether each piece of content supports that behavior. If it doesn’t, you can cut it or deprioritize it. This is a key part of working with your client and subject matter experts so you’re not dropping every piece of information into the course.

That’s where e-learning gets efficient. A course built around clear behavioral objectives doesn’t need to cover everything. It only needs to cover what helps learners perform. That’s usually less than you think.

It also changes how you handle assessments. If your objective says a learner should be able to resolve a customer complaint using the three-step process, your quiz shouldn’t ask them to recall the three steps. It should put them in a scenario where they have to use the steps. The objective tells you what to assess.

Getting objectives from stakeholders who don’t think this way

Your stakeholder hands you a list of topics they want covered. That’s normal. Your job is to turn topics into behaviors. A few questions help with that.

• Ask what the learner will be doing differently after the course. If the stakeholder can’t answer that, ask what’s going wrong right now that the course is supposed to fix. Work backward from the problem.
• Ask what a good performer looks like compared to a poor one. The difference between those two people is usually what the course could teach.

You won’t always get clean answers. But the questions push the conversation away from content coverage and toward performance change — and that’s where you need it to go.

Key takeaways

Next time you’re writing objectives, start with a behavior verb and challenge yourself to fill in the condition and standard before you move on. Share the completed objectives with your stakeholder before you build anything. Agreement on objectives upfront prevents a lot of scope creep later. If you can align on what learners should be able to do when they’re done, the rest of the course design gets a lot more straightforward.