Lesson 3: Planning Webinar Instruction

4. Writing Learning Objectives

The next step in planning your webinar is to write your learning objectives. 

A learning objective is a specific statement describing a measurable learning outcome of instruction.

By measurable, it means that you can observe when or if students achieve the objective. For example, a learning objective could state, "students will be able to log into a high-performance computing resource." You can observe that it happened by watching them do it or by having them submit some sort of artifact such as a screen capture to show that they did it successfully.

Learning objectives are derived by breaking your instructional goal into specific statements describing what learners must do to achieve it. The previous learning objective "students will be able to log into a high-performance computing resource" would be one of several for the instructional goal "use a high-performance computing resource." Others might be:

• Create a strong password
• Transfer files
• Customize the computing environment using Modules

Learning objectives are also called performance objectives, behavioral objectives, and instructional objectives. Robert Mager first used the term behavioral objective in 1975 to describe what the learner was able to do after instruction. In time, educators disliked the behavioral orientation and used the other terms to satisfy their preferences.

Read the following article explaining Robert Mager's learning objectives:
Robert Mager's Performance-based Learning Objectives