A new nemesis

I've progressed from being confounded by technology to being done in by "practice," "plan," "propose" and other dull words associated with learning objectives.  It's not that I don't understand learning objectives, I'm just having trouble writing them properly. The purpose of learning objectives is to specifically describe what you want the student to learn by the end of a certain lesson or class. What do I want my students to be able to do or understand by the end of this lesson? It's a key question to ask as a course is developed online or face to face. Without knowing the objectives the teacher can flounder needlessly and the students will get frustrated with a lack of direction.

But do they have to be written with such specific wording and boring verbs? It reminds me of my sophomore composition class in high school which required a tedious and overly detailed outline with points deducted if you put your name on the wrong side of the page. I've never done well with such rigid rules and I think that's what's happened with my learning objective difficulties.

Boring verbs aside, I find Bloom's Taxonomy helpful as I develop my first online course. The progression from knowledge to evaluation was especially helpful when coming up with activities to support the lesson and enhance learning. And the steps to design different activities between students, the instructor and the information has also been good to learn. As someone who never had teaching courses in college, it's great to find out I've been on the right track in my classes. But it also gets me thinking about ways to improve my online and in person teaching

But it has been a challenge to map out every single bit of reading and each activity right from the start of a class. I always enjoy putting together the syllabus for my face to face journalism classes. But I will admit I sometimes don't have all the activities for a class figured out until a week before. This leaves me a lot of flexibility to react to the latest news. But that fluidity can make it stressful since I'm a part-time teacher and my full-time professional writing life is often hectic. If I don't have everything mapped out well in advance things sometimes don't come together until the last minute and I don't think that is best for teaching or learning. So all the work ahead of an online class could be freeing and less stressful in the long run.

I've decided to approach my course development as if it were a knitting project. The learning objectives are like the basic knit and purl stitches. They are the building blocks and there isn't a whole lot of creativity that goes into a single knit stitch or a learning objective verb. The overall template for the class is akin to the knitting pattern and that's where the creativity really shines. The finished project is a student who has hopefully learned something from my class. Now if only I could get the sweater currently on my knitting needles to go together as easily as a week's lesson.