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Instructor Home > Helpful Tips for Online Instruction > Developing Online Goals and Objectives
Clearly identifying your course goal and objectives can improve communication, reduce student fears, and improve retention rates. Because of the lack of physical shared space, communication in an online environment can be more challenging than in a face-to-face environment. This challenge can be met by clearly explaining your course expectations to the online students at the start of the course.
Clearly delineated expectations can also help reduce the tension a student new to the online experience may be having. Below are definitions that may assist you in communicating your course expectations. In addition, you may want to consider taking DE 201, an intermediate Blackboard training workshop that will cover writing an effective syllabus for an online course, as well as other useful topics.
Goal:
Determine what students should be able to do after completing the course. This is usually a general statement such as: Learner will be able to analyze federal health plicy. To be more correct you can also specify the conditions: Given access to appropriate resources and using APA format, graduate students will generate a 10-page analysis of a specified health policy.
Objectives:
To generate the course objectives think of what skills and knowledges would be required to achieve the course goal. Using the technique of Robert Mager, if you walked into a room of people and wanted to divide them into two groups- those who knew how to analyze federal health policy and those who did not- what abilities would the people who go into the "know how to" group have? Perhaps, "Learner will be able to differientiate between a mandated federal policy and a recommended federal health policy". This is just one of the many objectives (skills, knowledges, abilities) that would be required to achieve the course goal.
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