Intro to Objectives and Outcomes

The foundation of instructional design is the alignment of course objectives and learning outcomes with all course content. Course objectives provide the broad course goals while learning outcomes provide the specific goals students will achieve when completing the assessments. Alignment ensures your course teaches students what you intend and that all information in your course has an instructional purpose.

Course Objectives

Course objectives, also called course goals, are overarching objectives that broadly describe what students will be able to do after completing the course. Typically objectives are derived from the course description. Course objectives set student and instructor expectations about what the course is teaching students to do. A typical college-level course has one to three overarching course-level objectives that align with the course description. See the Provost’s guidelines for Course Objectives for more information.

Student Learning Outcomes

Learning outcomes are statements that describe the specific knowledge, skills, or abilities students will be able to demonstrate in the real world as a result of completing a lesson. Whereas learning outcomes should not be assignment-specific, an assignment should allow students to demonstrate they have achieved the lesson outcome(s). All of the learning outcomes should support the course objectives. Every lesson--usually organized into modules, weeks, or units-- within the course should have one to five learning outcomes that support the course-level objectives. 

See the Objectives and Outcomes Builder Tool to learn more on how to write measurable course objectives and learning outcomes.

Aligning Your Course

Alignment is the connection between course objectives, learning outcomes, learning materials, and assessments. In a high quality course, the outcomes and objectives guide the course design. They ensure every piece of information in the course is aligned. If your course is aligned, all of the information in your course and everything the students are asked to do work in tandem and have a defined instructional purpose. 

Effective outcomes and objectives clearly identify the noun, or thing you want students to learn, and begin with measurable action verbs that can be selected from Bloom’s Taxonomy. Before adding any content to a course, consider how the content supports achievement of the outcomes and objectives in order to best align content to instructional & course goals. Your unit’s instructional design team can help support you in the course mapping process.

Resources and Next Steps

Create/Update your Course Syllabus
ASU Learning Objectives Builder Tool
Student Learning Outcomes vs Objectives
Using Bloom's Taxonomy to Write Outcomes
Writing Measurable Learning Outcomes