Talk:Instructional design/Learning objectives

Needs: In many cases I am going to use discussion to stage changes, but as they should be, these are elements for discussion, if that discussion is available.

Introduction

1. This is an excellent spot to mention the pre-analysis process that would presumably lead to the creation of instructional content. In many cases, two major questions will arise.

a. Is there a need for this project? Does it serve the learner's needs, the needs of the community that is surrounded by this knowledge, and by society at large?

b. Are there the resources needed for this project?

It is worth mentioning that in regard to many projects for instructional design on Wikiversity the answer is more likely to be affirmative to both questions than it would be for instructor lead courses at physical schools. The reason for this is as follows:

i. Wikiversity, and all her wikisister projects, serve all kinds of needs from major needs to niche requirements. As an embodiment of the diversity of knowledge this will almost always answer as yes. The exception may be negative in regard to the production of projects that reach a critical level of redundancy to what has already been developed. Often adding the elements that distinguish the proposed new redundant project from the preceding one, to the the pre-existing course will be sufficient. On a finer level, underneath the grand visions and purposes of Wikiversity, one can use the comments on Wikiversity, as well perform surveys, to determine more specifically what the typical needs of users that currently visit the website are.

ii. Wikiversity is based upon utilizing all of the human resources it can attract with as much time to offer as necessary. The Wikimedia Foundation does have objectives to have reach certain goals of editor participation across all of its child projects, but, in principle at least, the human and time resources far less limited. In practical terms it may be worth recognizing some current limitations. For example, currently there are not many editors on Wikiversity, therefore the creation of an instruction with the expectation of receiving a lot of editor community support may result in disappointment. Additionally there are few people that know how to hack MediaWiki well enough to successfully have code committed, therefore instructional design that relies on new technology that doesn't yet exist on Wikiversity may also suffer from this bottleneck. In theory these resources are available (in the wide world of open source) but currently, in practice they are more sparse.

2. There is the issue of the substantiation tag, that there is controversy about the value of learning objectives.

3. Additional data: The crafting of well design courses is often not rewarded by academic institutions, where as publishing research is. There is, at the very least, a Declining by Degrees quote about this, I am sure.

The Structure of Learning Objectives

1. A graphic would be much more visually palatable than the use of font colors for the describing Robert Mager's definition of "Learning Objectives"