Writing Learning Objectives That Are Not Useless

Open almost any workplace course and the second screen will list three or four learning objectives beginning "understand", "be aware of" or "gain an appreciation of". Nobody reads them. Nobody checks them at the end. They exist because a template had a slot.

What is a learning objective for?

Two things, and neither of them is decoration. It tells the learner what they will be able to do, so they can decide whether this is worth their time. And it tells you what the course must contain and what the assessment must test — which means an objective you cannot assess is not an objective, it is an aspiration.

If an objective is not doing at least one of those jobs, delete it. A course with two real objectives is better than one with six ornamental ones.

Why is "understand" a bad verb?

Because it describes something happening inside someone's head, and you cannot see inside someone's head. "Understand the escalation process" gives you no way to tell whether it happened, and no guidance about what the course should do.

Replace it with what understanding would let them do. "Identify which incidents require escalation within four hours" is checkable, it tells the learner something concrete, and it tells you exactly what content and what question the course needs.

The same applies to "know", "be aware of", "appreciate" and "be familiar with". They feel like they are saying something and they are all describing an internal state.

What does a good objective look like?

An observable action, a condition where useful, and enough specificity to be checkable:

• Weak: Understand the code of conduct. Better: Recognise the three most common conflicts of interest in our work and state what to do about each.
• Weak: Be aware of manual handling risks. Better: Identify when a lift requires a second person or mechanical aid.
• Weak: Gain an appreciation of data privacy. Better: Decide whether a given request for customer information can be actioned without approval.

Notice that the better versions are longer and more specific, and that each one implies a knowledge check almost automatically. That is the test: if you cannot immediately imagine the question, the objective is not finished.

How many should a course have?

Three to five for most courses, and fewer is usually a sign of clarity rather than thinness. Beyond about six, learners stop reading the list, and you are probably describing a course that wants to be two.

A useful discipline: if you cannot fit the objectives on one screen without scrolling, the course has too many. That constraint tends to force the useful question, which is what this course is really for.

Should I show them to learners?

Yes, but not as a wall at the start. A list of six formal objectives on screen two is the most reliably skipped screen in e-learning.

Two things work better. Put a short plain-language version at the start — "by the end of this you will be able to spot a conflict of interest and know who to tell" reads as a promise rather than a specification. Then place the formal objective at the head of the module it belongs to, where it is doing work for someone deciding whether to skip ahead.

What is the relationship to assessment?

One to one, ideally. Every objective should have at least one question that checks it, and every question should map to an objective. This sounds bureaucratic and is actually the fastest way to find problems in a course.

Objectives with no question are content you have not checked. Questions with no objective are usually trivia — the date a policy was introduced, the number of steps in a process — and they are what makes learners feel a course is testing whether they were paying attention rather than whether they can do the job.

Do I need Bloom's taxonomy?

It is useful as a prompt and harmful as a ritual. The genuine value is that it reminds you there are levels above recall, and most workplace training sits stubbornly at the bottom because recall is easy to write questions for.

You do not need to classify each objective or produce a matrix. You need to ask, occasionally, whether "list the four principles" is really what you want, or whether what you want is "decide which principle applies to this situation" — which is harder to write and considerably more useful.

A quick way to fix an existing course

Take the objectives you have, and for each one write the question you would ask to check it. Any objective where that is difficult is badly written. Any where the question turns out to be trivia is testing the wrong thing. The rewrite usually follows on its own.