Due to the fact that in higher education instructors are dealing with adult learners, aligning assessments with learning outcomes and course materials is especially important. In the online environment, the meaning and importance of readings and activities must be made clear in order to help motivate students throughout the course, because higher motivation leads to more effective learning. In Effective Online Teaching Stavredes (2011), discusses how adult learners have a need to know. If the assessments and learning outcomes are not aligned, learners may have difficulty determining the significance of the tasks they face in the course (Stavredes, 2011). Completing assignments and activities in an online course with no objective(s) makes student work appear less meaningful. It can be difficult for a student to muster the enthusiasm to complete an assignment to the best of her/his ability when the purpose for the assignment is unclear or not present. It’s similar to going on a trip with someone to a specific destination, but forgetting your map (and your GPS or smart phone) at home. You get lost, you lose focus, and you complain or bicker with the driver (the instructor). Providing students with clear objectives and aligned assessments is like handing them a GPS with the destination already entered. Students know where they are going—and why—and are ready to ride along with you.

Now that you know a little more about the meaning and significance of alignment, let’s discuss how you can do this in your online course. I favor a linear method of creating measurable learning outcomes. To achieve this, we can start by building a table. Think about the skills you want your students to master and make a list; we’ll call these your goals. Next to that list, write what they must do (or know) in order to achieve the goals; this list will become your materials. List examples of assignments you would want the students to successfully complete in order to show their attainment of the skills in your goals column; these will be your assessments. You may even want to make a fourth column explaining how the materials, assessments, and skills align, also known as an explanation.

At this point, you will want to create a fifth column in which you turn your list of goals into sentences using action verbs found in Bloom’s Taxonomy; these are your learning objectives. A simple Google search on Bloom’s Taxonomy action verbs will provide examples of both Bloom’s action verbs and effective learning objectives. You can also contact CIRT for a copy of our Writing Learning Objectives table. Use the verb list to help you develop your learning objectives, always thinking of your sentence starter as: “Students will be able to…” Here’s an example of thinking through the above process:

I want my students to master the following skills: writing effective learning objectives, and aligning online assessments to the learning objectives. To help them with this, they need to be familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy action verbs, writing objectives, and they need to see examples of measurable learning objectives. I like the idea of having a quiz in which students must correctly identify which learning objective appropriately aligns with example assignments to show that they understand how the objectives align. Explanation feedback would be provided for each question to strengthen their understanding. Having students submit an assignment in which they write (or rewrite) learning objectives for a course they will teach (or have taught) would be another example of an assignment. I could also have the students participate in a discussion in which they discuss selected online assessments and their alignment with learning objectives so that students can receive feedback from their classmates. Finally, I could have students submit a plan that includes at least three assessments with aligned learning materials and objectives and an explanation as to how they align, similar to the table presented in this article.

From all of the above, I can state my goals, create several learning objectives, choose aligned course materials/media for my assessment ideas, and then choose the appropriate action verbs to ensure that the learning objectives are measurable.