Page 87 - Making Instruction Work

chap 7 3/4/97 3:38 PM Page 73

7

Course Objectives

Situation: You want to draft descriptions of the impor-
tant outcomes of the proposed instruction.

Your analysis has revealed that there are things your intended
students (a) can’t yet do that (b) they need to be able to do.Now
it’s time to describe the instructional outcomes (the need to
do’s); it’s time to construct a verbal picture that will help guide
you in developing the instruction and help guide your students
in focusing their efforts. (This is not to suggest that you should
avoid writing out your objectives until you have completed the
analysis steps. Even if you do no analysis at all, it is still useful to
reveal in writing what you want students to be able to do when
they leave the instruction.)

What Are Objectives?

Objectives are a little like blueprints. They provide the
guides that will guarantee that you are teaching what needs to
be taught. And, because objectives describe outcomes rather
than instructional process, they free developers and instruc-
tors alike to use all their ingenuity and creativity toward
accomplishing those outcomes.