L6 3 7

=Teaching staff are provided with support resources (including training, guidelines and examples) on using learning objectives to guide e-learning design and (re)development.=

Evidence
Mager (1997) notes that without instructional objectives the following three problems arise: teachers can’t decide which content and procedures will help them to achieve their objectives, it is difficult to create assessments to tell whether students are competent or not, and students won’t know when to stop practicing.

However, it is not enough to merely require the clear statement of objectives in documentation templates because, ‘to order people to write objectives without ensuring they know how or why, is to invite dissension and frustration’ (Mager 1997, pg 151).

Resources
Milne & White (2005) collect together twenty-three sets of e-learning quality guidelines from an array of geographical regions. Such guidelines, or something like them, should be part of the support offered to staff by their organizations. Staff need guidelines, and examples of good practice.

Many web resources offer guidelines to writing good instructional objectives based on Mager’s (1984) and Bloom’s (1956) work, e.g.:

http://med.fsu.edu/education/FacultyDevelopment/PDF/writingobjectives.pdf

http://www2.gsu.edu/~mstmbs/CrsTools/Magerobj.html

http://classweb.gmu.edu/ndabbagh/Resources/IDKB/develop_objectives.htm

http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/art3_4.htm

Teaching staff are provided with templates, examples, training and support in using the range of information resources available to support student learning.

Information literacy and research skill development should be reflected in the learning objectives either implicitly or explicitly.

Snavely (2001) suggests that In addition to assessing all students’ basic information literacy skills, faculty and librarians should also work together to develop assessment instruments and strategies in the context of particular disciplines, as information literacy manifests itself in the specific understanding of the knowledge creation, scholarly activity, and publication processes found in those disciplines. However, Dunn (2002) has found that breadth and depth scores for information literacy predict performance across a range of information assessment tasks. If you change the context or scenario the same information literate students perform well.