Why Learning Objectives — Not Courses — Are the Fundamental Unit of Instruction
For practical reasons, our education system has tracked courses as the fundamental unit of instruction. Your high school or college transcript lists the courses you took, and what grade you received. MOOCs are fantastic resources…except that the course completion rate is low. We have just swallowed wholesale the idea that what matters — all that matters — is that you complete a course. This thinking is wrong, and it has stymied progress in education. The criticism of the course completion rate of MOOCs is likewise misguided. But it’s also understandable because tracking anything more granular has been, until recently, logistically impossible. So if a course is not the basic unit, what should be? Well, if you read the title of this, you probably know my answer: learning objectives.
What’s the difference between a course and a learning objective? A learning objective, or an intended learning outcome, is a simple statement of what is to be mastered, e.g., “Explain the process of photosynthesis.” “Identify the stars in the Orion Constellation.” “Summarize Descartes’ Cogito argument.” Etc. are all examples of learning objectives. A course, well, we’re familiar with courses: “Biology 101”, “Introduction to Astronomy”, “History of Modern Western Philosophy”. With objectives, it is quite straightforward to assess whether a student has demonstrated mastery over them, or not. To determine whether someone has passed a course or not is a vague (or mechanical) question, and what that means is a much more subjective (or mechanical) judgment. A record that someone passed a course usually can’t tell us what they actually mastered. We must do a lot of assuming to get there. That’s a problem.
While the 5 keys closes the circuit so one can bypass expensive colleges and universities, design around learning objectives instead of courses shifts one from another college entering the fray to a new frontier of access to building and following learning paths. The central, unique feature of the Teachur platform is that it is designed around the learning objective as the basic unit of instruction. We built the platform to be the logical end of competency-based education. The vast majority of other efforts in this space (whether it’s a college degree, microdegree, mooc, alternative learning certificate, etc.) are designed around the course as the basic unit. Though this may sound like a trivial difference, it makes all the difference — to both teachers and students. It is akin to the design of iTunes selling songs rather than albums — this is what we should have been tracking all along, but we couldn’t until we had the right platforms.
This design enables key differences, such as a much more rigorous and robust approach to competency-based learning, educational records detailed to the specific skills and competencies, and a straight-forward framework to leverage abundant instructional resources. This feature is the key to curricular evolution at a granular scale. In a follow up post, I’ll go into more detail about the differences and advantages of a design that holds objectives as the fundamental unit of instruction.
What do you think? Were you shouting ‘Amen!’ after every paragraph? Do I have it all wrong? Please let me know in the comments. Or connect with me on Twitter, My site, LinkedIn, or reach me at: ben@teachur.co.
