A Practical Guide to Setting Up Learning Objectives For An Effective Microlearning Module


Learning objectives are the foundational building blocks on which your learning material is built.


Introduction

In our previous article on microlearning, we looked at the characteristics of an effective Microlearning module:

  1. It has a clearly defined set of learning objectives
  2. It’s easy to digest
  3. It’s visually appealing
  4. It focuses on practice
  5. It offers early feedback to the learner
  6. It tracks the learner’s progress

Today, we’ll start our journey into making our microlearning content more effective by looking at the first item on this list: the clear definition of learning objectives.

Although this sounds like a trivial matter in the overall picture of creating teaching material, its importance is paramount as it sets the direction for the whole module - and potentially its mood too.

Whether you’re a seasoned instructional designer who’s trying their hand at microlearning, or a beginner who’s just getting their feet wet, this article will give you the tools to write a good set of learning objectives that will make your content effective and enjoyable.

Ready? Let’s jump right in!

Determining and understanding your target audience

The first step in creating effective learning objectives is to not only determine, but also understand your target audience. To this effect, we can consider the following questions:

  1. Who is the target audience?
  2. What do they want / need to achieve by taking this module?
  3. Why do they want this? What’s their motivation?

The first question tells us where the baseline is for our module: what we can expect the learner to know already, and what we need to spend more time on teaching.

The second question allows us to think about our teaching content from the learner’s point of view. This is important as we need to understand how they’d approach the course in order to make the learning experience more enjoyable, and by consequence more effective.

Lastly, the “why” deals with the learner’s expectations for the module, to discover the real motivation behind the consumption of the course. For instance, for a foreign language course: are they learning to further their conversational skills, or do they just need to pass a standardized exam, that being a requirement for further education? In the first case, we can create learning objectives which are more geared towards listening comprehension and oral production, while in the latter we can focus more on vocabulary and grammar drills.

As we answer the questions above, it’s often useful to create a learner’s persona. This is like a character in a novel, a protagonist for our learning course based on the answers above. We can then tailor our learning objectives, and indeed all of our learning material to fulfill this persona’s needs.

Creating a persona is a technique most often employed in the disciplines of UX and Product Design, to give a face - however imaginary - to the target user. Our team at Steed, when doing this, goes as far as giving a fictional name, job and occupation to these personae, often even using stock photography to make them feel more “real”. This, in turn, makes the satisfaction of the user’s requirements feel more real in the designer’s mind, leading them to devise solutions that are more practical than they would be otherwise.

Here’s a sample learner’s persona based on the prior example of a foreign language course:

Sharon Wu
Age: 23 | Occupation: Student
Sharon is a graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. She’s fond of French culture and wants to travel to France this Summer to experience life in Provence, and investigate whether she would enjoy studying for a Master’s Degree there. Her current level of French is certified as CEFR A2.

Defining the desired outcome

Now that we know our audience, we have a starting point for our module. Next, we need to define its ending point: where we want our learner to be once they’ve successfully completed their learning journey with us. This can be a one-paragraph statement defining the intended high-level result for our learner’s persona taking the module.

Going back to our foreign language example, we could say that the high-level result for our module would be something like the following:

By the end of the module, the learner would be able to recount in French an event that has happened to them in the past week, using the correct verb tenses for the indicated timeframe.

Breaking it down

Once we have defined the high-level result for our module, we can start breaking it down into concrete learning objectives. The important thing to bear in mind here is that the learning objectives need to be concise, clear and actionable.

Being concise and clear helps reduce confusion, both for the learner trying to understand whether the module is for them, and for the author of the learning material - ensuring they understand the goal they’re working towards.

Actionability ensures that the content we’re going to write is suitable for microlearning. As you may recall from our opening statement, a good microlearning module is interactive and focuses on practice. An actionable learning object is something that the learner can put into practice.

Back to our example, this is somewhat easy to envisage. Here’s a sample learning objective broken down from the high-level result we previously defined:

Conjugate simple verbs of motion in the perfect tense

Reviewing and Refining

After we have written down a potential list of learning objectives from our breakdown of the high-level result, it’s time to put them to the test.

First of all, we need to arrange the learning objectives in a sensible order. This can either be by difficulty (how easy it is for the student), complexity (how complex the concept is) or cognitive processing requirements (is this a high-order thinking objective or a low-order one?).

Secondly, we need to ensure they’re clear, concise and actionable as we set them out to be in our previous step. To this effect, it’s useful to seek feedback from other instructional designers (if possible) and / or from experts in the subject matter being taught. The main questions to answer here are:

  1. Does this learning objective contribute to the high-level result?
  2. Is this objective small enough for a microlearning module, or does it need to be broken down further?
  3. (Conversely to the above) Is this objective substantial enough to be listed out individually, or can it be combined with other material?

Once again returning to our foreign language course example, we can for instance discover that the verbs of motion we looked at in the previous paragraph are too few on their own, and therefore they’d work better in a more complex learning objective:

Perfect tense verb conjugation: regular verb conjugation + most common irregular ones

Defining the Assessment Criteria

Now that the list of learning objectives is ready, we can define how we can tell whether the learning objective has been met at the end of the module.

This is useful not only to define tests, questionnaires and interactive practice sessions - which, you may recall, are fundamental to microlearning - but also to give the learner a way to self-assess whether they acquired the learning objective as they study through the module.

In our foreign language example, this could look something like:

Perfect tense verb conjugation: regular verb conjugation + most common irregular ones

Exercises

  1. Read a passage in French written in the perfect tense and select the right meaning from a multiple-choice list
  2. Translate sentences written in the perfect tense from French
  3. Translate sentences to French using the perfect tense

Congratulations! You now have a list of learning objectives that will help your microlearning module soar.

Remembering the Nature of our Module Overall

In closing, it’s worth to point out that any learning objective needs to accommodate for the teaching method chosen to deliver them.

Since in our case we’re talking about microlearning, here are again some points of distinction with generic e-learning content that are worth to bear in mind when defining learning objectives:

  1. Focus: Microlearning modules are usually highly focused on a specific, narrow topic or skill. Therefore, it’s beneficial to define highly targeted learning outcomes.
  2. Duration and speed: Microlearning lessons are bite-sized. They’re expected to take no more than 15 minutes a pop. Conversely, the modules themselves should remain quite lean, and with them the learning objectives. In case of doubt, it’s better to breakdown our teaching material more granularly than to leave it arranged in larger chunks. The latter would undoubtedly result in either lessons which are too long, or modules with a large number of lessons, leading the learner to lose focus and /or get confused.
  3. Practicality: As briefly mentioned earlier, microlearning modules have an emphasis on practice. Conversely, the learning outcomes should be focused on practical skills. The simple acquisition of knowledge is often not enough for a microlearning module. The user needs to acquire skills that they can use in practical situations going forward.

Wrapping Up

In this article, we have looked at a top-down strategy to define learning objectives for a microlearning module:

  1. Determine who your audience is: Not just in terms of their existing knowledge, but also about their learning intention and overall motivation. That can help you write more focused teaching material.
  2. Define the module outcome: What’s the high-level result we want the learner to achieve? Start at the end of the module to understand the journey there.
  3. Break it down: Take this high-level result and break it down into smaller chunks. Each of these pieces is essentially a learning outcome, that you can now work on refining.
  4. Review and refine: Review your breakdown and refine it to create the final list of learning outcomes, seeking feedback from other instructional designers and subject-matter experts along the way.
  5. Define the assessment criteria: How can you tell whether the learner has achieved the intended learning objective? Define the criteria which will be used to assess this.
  6. Don’t forget about microlearning: Keep in mind that the objectives you’re defining are going to be delivered as a set of microlearning lessons. Are they focused enough? Are they bite-sized enough? Are they practical enough?

In closing, we can say that learning objectives are paramount in microlearning modules as they provide clear direction for learners, outlining precisely what they are expected to achieve. These objectives not only guide content creation but also enable the design of assessments, ensuring that the module effectively measures learning outcomes. Furthermore, they motivate and engage learners by highlighting the relevance and value of the content, and set expectations on the learning activities scheduled. This leads to increased participation and retention. By keeping the learning experience focused, learning objectives contribute to a more efficient and impactful learning experience, ultimately resulting in a more successful learning outcome.