In this solo episode, host Beth Cougler Blom explores the critical role that learning outcomes play in designing effective learning experiences. Beth shares practical insights on crafting clear, learner-centred outcomes that form the foundation of any well-designed workshop or course. She explains the difference between learning outcomes and learning objectives, offers guidance on aligning outcomes with activities and assessments, and provides tips for selecting measurable verbs that reflect desired behaviour changes—all to help streamline content and ensure relevance in your learning designs.
Links From the Episode
- Design to Engage: How to Create and Facilitate a Great Learning Experience For Any Group, by Beth Cougler Blom
- Universal Design for Learning Guidelines from CAST
- Download learning outcomes verbs lists on the Design to Engage book page
Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast
- Follow Facilitating on Purpose on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube
- facilitatingonpurpose.com
Connect with Beth Cougler Blom
- Give feedback or suggest upcoming show topics or guests at hello@bcblearning.com
- Visit bcblearning.com to explore Beth’s services as a facilitator and learning designer
- Purchase a copy of Beth’s book, Design to Engage
- Follow Beth on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions.
Show Transcript
[Upbeat music playing]
[Show intro]
Beth Cougler Blom
00:01
Welcome to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work.
00:17
I’m your host Beth Cougler Blom. [Episode intro] Hey, welcome to the podcast. This is Beth, your host, and I want to thank you for joining me for this episode today. I’m happy to be here and I hope you are too. This episode is about a topic that I have known that I needed to do for quite some time as a solo episode and for whatever reason I’ve been putting it off.
00:42
Not because I don’t love the topic, but because I think it’s a complex one to talk about and I know I only have so much time in a short solo episode to do it. So I’ve been putting it off and putting it off and now I cannot put it off any longer because talking about learning outcomes is so pivotal to my work as a learning designer and our work with clients and building great courses, great learning experiences in any mode, that I knew I just had to address this topic on the podcast because it would be useful to us in our work with clients and hopefully that means it would be useful to you as well.
01:23
So this episode is all about learning outcomes. What are they? Why do we have them? How do we make activities that align with them and all sorts of questions like that. And I, as I said, will try to do justice to this topic in the time that I have and know that you can always reach out to me and let me know if there was something that I missed that you want me to try to include in some future episode. Or, I’m happy to just answer your email-based questions as well if you want to reach out.
01:53
So let’s get started. A great way to start with anything, of course, is to just define what the thing is. And so, let’s talk about what a learning outcome actually is first. So when I write learning outcome statements, I’m really getting clear on the learners at the heart of my learning design process for whatever workshop or course that I’m building.
02:18
And learning outcome statements are statements that are specific and measurable and observable about what the learners should be able to do either by the end of the learning experience or at some point in the future, depending on when you contextualize that learning outcome as to when it’s going to be achieved.
02:39
Often we just align them and write them so that by the end of the learning experience, the learners are going to be able to do x. So learning outcomes are statements that capture the behaviours, most of all, that we want to see in the learners,
02:56
the change in their behaviours because of attending and participating in the learning experience. They can be about behaviours, they can be about knowledge, they can be about physical, tactile things, and there are different ways that we approach that in terms of the language that we use based on learning domains.
03:18
I think I’ve talked about this before, but our main learning domains are the cognitive domain, that’s your head and thinking area, the affective domain, some people think about that as the heart, feelings, values, beliefs area, and then the psychomotor domain, which is our physical, tactile, touch, movement, all the things around physicality in those domains.
03:46
So learning outcomes draw on those domains when we’re trying to nail down what those behaviour changes are in learners that we want to see by the end of the learning experience. On the face of it, learning outcomes are very short sentences and they actually complete a stem.
04:05
The stem I like to use is, “By the end of the learning experience, you will be able to:”, and then the learning outcome phrase starts, usually with a measurable, observable verb such as define or value or list or apply.
04:25
So the learning outcome actually completes the stem that is at the top of the list for all of the learning outcome statements for whatever your event or workshop is going to be. Now let’s talk about a weird terminology thing around learning outcomes right off the bat because wherever you are in the world, you might be thinking, “Well, Beth, why are you saying they’re called learning outcomes?
04:48
I think of those as learning objectives.” And you actually might be right. We have a weird thing going on in the field where some of us call this thing, these statements, learning outcomes, and some of us call them learning objectives.
05:04
And actually, if you look back and read the original research where a man named Bloom and his fellow researchers, they worked on the issue of learning objectives, they did use the term learning objectives.
05:19
I don’t know why, but where I’m from in this part of Canada, and specifically because I worked with Royal Roads University at one point, which is very outcomes-based, we use the term learning outcome.
05:32
And we actually think of learning objectives as something different. And I’ve talked about this in my book, but I make a distinction between objectives and outcomes in that objectives are often phrased in terms of what we would like to be able to do with the learners in the learning experience.
05:51
It’s our intention for what happens in the experience. And when we write objectives, we often say, you’re going to learn about, you will participate in, or you will be able to discuss something. And so for me, I have this distinction between objectives, my intention for the learners and what we’re going to do in the experience, and outcomes that are learner-centred and describe what the learners themselves will be able to do by the end of the learning experience or sometime after that.
06:20
Now, if you’re in the United States or another country, you might be using the term learning objectives for the second piece that I just mentioned. What I’m calling a learning outcome, you might actually be calling learning objective.
06:35
It’s totally confusing, I know, but I just want you to see the distinction. Whatever you call the name, objective or outcome, I’m encouraging you to write them in the second way I just talked about. I want you to write them so that they’re learner-centred and they complete the stem, “By the end of the learning experience, you will be able to”, and have them be statements around that behaviour change that should be happening starting in the session and maybe completing after the session.
07:06
So don’t worry too much about what you call them, just write them not as your intention for what happens in the session, but what the learners will be able to do, know, or value, sometimes we say, by the end of the session.
07:20
The learner-centredness here is really, really key. If we write learning objectives, it really situates us in our experience as an instructor or as a facilitator and what we want to have happen in the experience.
07:34
But if we write them in the learning outcome style, then we can be learner-centred and we can keep the people at the heart of the process and really, as we design the session, keep asking ourselves, is this going to contribute to them being able to do that thing that we said we wanted them to be
07:55
be able to do when we wrote the learning outcome statements? So make sure they’re learner-centred and that they’re absolutely written so that they describe what the learners need to do. I hope you can see because of what I’ve said so far that learning outcomes are the foundation that we lay for ourselves when we’re designing anything, either whether it’s in person or whether it’s virtual or whether it’s an online asynchronous type of learning.
08:23
They’re the foundation that we lay, that we can design to, then, to be able to create something – an experience for the learners – that will measure up to those outcomes. So when we draft learning outcomes and later finalize them as we design, it gives us exactly what we need to be able to put content and activities or assessments
08:49
into the session. And we’re looking for that alignment between those three things: the outcomes, the content, and the activities or assessments. And sometimes I actually use a triangle image to describe that alignment and what needs to happen there.
09:05
And I put the outcomes on one point of the triangle, the content on the second point of the triangle, and the activities or the assessments on the third point of the triangle. And all those three things have to line up and be exactly in line with each other.
09:20
And together they provide the foundation for us of our workshop or of our course. Now, why did I just say activities or assessments? I tend to make a distinction there and a lot of people do, I suppose.
09:33
Activities tend, for me, to be ungraded things that I’m doing as a facilitator in a workshop or a course that doesn’t involve grading. Assessments are when we are actually assessing or grading the individual participants and giving them a letter grade or a number grade for their work.
09:52
So you can think about your situation, whether you want to call them activities or assessments. So learning outcomes provide, again, this foundation for us to design from. And what we do is we try to write them as close as possible when we draft them at the outset of a learning design process, but we work with them all the way along as we insert that content,
10:16
we insert activities or assessments and we hone the learning outcomes as we go along to see if they’re working for us or if we have to make shifts in them as we complete our design process. For me, learning outcomes are something I want to start thinking about with my client right away at the start of our process.
10:38
We draft initial learning outcomes as a bit of a guide and then we continue to hone them as we get more clear on the time that we’ve got and who the learners are and what they already know – all those learner analysis pieces – and we hone along the way. And they absolutely help me make decisions about what should be in and out of a session and what the activities are that should be in the session.
11:02
Sometimes we don’t get it right when we draft learning outcomes and we do have to revise them as we go to be really more exact for what we’ve got time to do in the session. If you don’t write learning outcomes at the beginning or near the beginning, I think you’re going to struggle because you’re going to end up just kind of throwing that spaghetti on the wall, not really having the guide that you can design to, and you’re not really going to have that thing that you can check and balance against to help you make those decisions about what’s in or out.
11:36
If I know anything about working with people to design courses is that there usually isn’t a dearth of potential content. There usually is quite a bit of content that could go in any potential workshop.
11:50
And so when we have written learning outcomes, that is the check and balance thing that we have so that we can always be going back to the outcomes and saying, do we need this thing, this content, or this activity in the session because it may or may not align with outcomes.
12:07
And if it does align with outcomes, great, sounds like we probably need it. And if it doesn’t align with outcomes, that gives us a decision to make about whether that thing should actually be kept in the session. Especially if we’ve got time constraints and something’s got to go.
12:22
So if you don’t write outcomes at the very beginning, you might get into trouble because you really don’t have anything to check and balance against. So learning outcomes really help us be realistic about what’s achievable in the timeframe available.
12:36
Sometimes I get the question about, well, how many outcomes should we have in a certain time period? In a half day workshop, should there be 20 outcomes? Should there be three outcomes? What’s the gauge for how many outcomes we should have?
12:50
It’s really hard to say that, but right away I’ll probably say that you’ll never have 20 outcomes [chuckles] in a half day workshop because you probably won’t have time to put 20 activities in a half day workshop so that you have an activity that’s aligned with every outcome.
13:08
And so right away you’re going to shorten the amount of outcomes that you have because if you think of it in terms of alignment, every time you have an outcome, you will have some sort of activity that’s directly aligned with that.
13:21
And activities take time. They could take five minutes, but they also could take 20 minutes or 30 minutes or more. And so it really depends on what the content is that you’re trying to teach and help the group learn and what that is and how long it takes for them to be able to do something related to the content.
13:39
So I can’t really say how many learning outcomes you should have when you design a certain length workshop or course, it really just depends on what the activity is and how that’s happening and how much time you need for that.
13:53
So, as you design, when you’ve got your draft outcomes, you’ll be making decisions around what’s in and out in terms of both the content and activities and looking back at your learning outcomes to see if you need to throw any out because you really just don’t have time for that in the session or if you need to finesse them and change the verbs or change the way they’re described so that it becomes more realistic for what you can do in the actual session.
14:18
Here’s a little example around that. The other day, I had a potential client reach out and they wanted us to create a half-day workshop to teach facilitation skills to a group of people that they had.
14:29
And I think the draft outcome that they provided – which was actually a little bit unusual actually to get somebody to give me draft outcomes, usually I’m the one that’s giving the client draft outcomes – but I think they gave me an outcome, something like
14:43
to be able to use facilitation skills by the end of that short half-day workshop. And I said, how many learners do you have? And they said, well, we have about 20. [Laughs] I said, well, in a half-day workshop, we’re not gonna have time to have all of those participants use facilitation skills.
15:01
That means that every single person in the room has to get up and facilitate something and probably receive feedback on it. And that’s actually gonna take days for 20 people to be able to do that. And so that was a good conversation that I’d had with that potential client to just say, I don’t think the verb there is use facilitation skills.
15:22
It might be to list facilitation skills or to describe certain things around facilitation. And there’s all sorts of things that we can do that are much easier to accomplish in half-day with a group of 20 people.
15:36
And so it just gives us something to have a conversation around and get that verb right in terms of what we think is possible in the session for again, the time that we have and sometimes the number of people we have too, because every single person in the room needs to be seen to be doing the behaviour that’s listed in the learning outcome.
15:56
And that’s an important consideration as well. Here’s another example that kind of demonstrates that same concept. So I had a conversation with someone in the field who is emerging in her knowledge around learning outcomes and she was telling me that in her workshop that she was creating, she had a decision-making framework that she wanted the group to be able to use.
16:20
But when she took it out and she was looking at it, she realized that it was actually unrealistic to think that people were going to actually use the framework for decision-making in their everyday life.
16:31
She knew they weren’t gonna use it. So my response was that, well, if you know that they’re not gonna use it in their everyday life, that means that it’s not a learning outcome. Your learning outcome is not
16:43
to use the decision-making framework because why would you have them do it in the session if you didn’t think that they were going to do it in everyday life? But my question to her was, is there something around decision-making that you think that the participants are going to do?
17:01
What is the change that you’re hoping for with these particular people that is going to happen because of being in your session that would impact their everyday life? For example, it could be that she wants the learners to consider how their own values impact their decision-making.
17:19
That was just something I proposed because, of course, I’ve worked a lot with learning outcomes and I can just throw things up and see if people resonate with them. So this person that I was chatting to, she lit up at this point and she talked about how often she brings values and beliefs into her workshop.
17:36
And that seemed really relevant to her, to what she actually was trying to get them to do. Sometimes I call this the whole point [chuckles] that you’re trying to do with your learners or the gist is another way to talk about it.
17:49
So she and I then talked about the cognitive and affective domains, the two domains of the three that I mentioned earlier, and the difference between those two domains. So to use the framework, the decision-making framework, is likely a cognitive thing.
18:04
That’s a thinking task. And it maybe isn’t what she was going for when she was designing her course. But asking about values and beliefs is an affective domain exercise. And it sounded like it was maybe more the point that she was trying to get the learners to.
18:21
So I often do this when I see draft learning outcomes that are given to me by a client. And I take a look at the time we’ve got and the learners that they have and the behaviours that the learners are being asked to do in the draft outcome statements,
18:38
and it’s kind of my time to help the client get real about something. And I often say, is this what you really want the learners to be able to do? Or is it something that’s a little bit easier than this, for example?
18:52
And that’s so common for clients to say, oh, yeah, the way that’s phrased, that’s actually not what we want them to do. We want them to do this other thing. And often it’s a fair bit easier. Here’s another example that kind of demonstrates that.
19:06
A few years ago, we created an e-learning course. And it was for the fossil management office here in our province. And in BC, there is a report a fossil form that people can fill out when they find fossils around the province.
19:22
And I think the client, in this case, their original draft outcome was something like to be able to define all the elements of the fossil reporting form. And it almost sounded like they wanted learners to memorize all the pieces of the form so that they could basically regurgitate it back in the course. You can imagine that probably would be a very long multiple choice question, maybe not a very engaging one either. [chuckles]
19:49
But I said to the client, well, wait a minute here. Isn’t this report a fossil form online? And they said, yes, you know, here it is. It’s very easily accessible by just googling the words , “report a fossil in BC”.
20:02
And so I said, well, can we just teach them that? Isn’t that what we can teach them? That if they just Google or type into any browser that they’re looking for “report a fossil BC” and it literally will come up with the form,
20:16
Iisn’t that the behaviour that you want them to do? You want them to be able to search the internet to just find the form? Because the form goes through all the things that are needed in terms of reporting a fossil.
20:26
They don’t have to memorize all the things that are in the report a fossil form. They just have to memorize that they literally have to Google it. So we made the learning outcome around that internet search rather than all of the elements within the report a fossil form.
20:42
It was so much easier that way and realistic to what actually happens in people’s real life when they want to report fossils. There’s always all sorts of decisions to make then around what we write about when we write learning outcomes.
20:57
As a learning designer, my work with clients is often where you see me saying, “It can be anything you want it to be, but you just have to choose what you want it to be.” Do you want the outcome to be around this or do you want it to be around that?
21:12
When we’re partnering with clients, they’re the subject matter experts. They know their topic. I don’t know their topic, but I just know the good questions that I can ask to help them come up with the answers so that the learners get what they need.
21:26
So here’s another example. I was talking with another person and they were talking about how they do a lot of arts-based processes in their workshops. And they were wondering how to write learning outcomes around that, and that’s more of a process thing.
21:41
We talked about the fact that we can still write learning outcomes when this is the case, when the point is to use an arts-based process. So it’s just a matter of deciding again, how to phrase the outcome and what it should actually be.
21:55
Is the outcome to do the arts-based activity, like develop a skill in painting if you’re giving them a painting activity or is the outcome to say something about a particular content, for example, how to illustrate one of your values through the modality of a painting or a video or an image or something like that.
22:14
Both are things that we can write outcomes around but this person who I was talking to, she’s the designer and the facilitator of the experience. And so she needs to decide what her intention is and then state the outcome that’s related to her intention.
22:28
It can be one or the other. I mean, maybe both, but she gets to decide. I just ask her the right questions to help her be able to make that decision. So learning outcomes can be written around anything you want them to be, but what’s the point?
22:43
Again, what’s the behaviour change that you’re looking for in the learner? And what’s the thing that they actually are going to do in real life when they get back to the office or in their work or in the field or wherever the place is that they’re going to use the ultimate skill or knowledge that you’re teaching them?
23:02
One of the things that would be great to learn about as you learn about learning outcomes, or dive into them more deeply than maybe you have been in the past, is to think about how universal design for learning, UDL, relates to this, because this helps us think about the ‘what’ of a learning outcome and how it can look different than the ‘how’ of getting there.
23:26
So if the outcome, for example, is to express or illustrate a person’s values through an art-based modality, then we can give the learners lots of choice as to what modalities they can choose to get to that particular outcome.
23:41
They can paint, they can do a video, whatever, as I’ve said. So really try to tease out the what of the learning outcome from the how. Maybe you don’t really care about the how, and you’re going to be able to offer them choice within how they demonstrate the what.
23:58
So that’s a really great UDL approach. There are so many things that we can learn from UDL, but that’s one of them, giving people the element of the choice. And so again, you just have to figure out what the goal is, and then your learners can either tell you how they think they’re going to be able to get there or you can offer them options and they can choose from the list of how they’re going to be able to get there and to demonstrate that learning outcome to you.
24:24
Now here’s another big question that people often ask me, what counts as a learning outcome? Sometimes we get confused because we have multiple things that kind of string together and they’re all part of the same content.
24:38
So let’s say we have, you know, topic A1 and A2 and A3, they’re all around the topic of A, but they’re sort of like a one, two, three step to get there. And these are different content pieces or different activity pieces that are all along the way.
24:54
The question is, are each of those pieces aligned with a learning outcome? Do we need three different learning outcomes to align with them? My answer is usually no, that often if you look at the last thing along the way, the last bead on the string, for example, that often is the last thing that you want people to be able to do in terms of their behaviour change.
25:17
So that’s the thing that you can write the outcome around. The other two pieces, A1 and A2, for example, when A3 is the last thing, A1 and A2 can be just scaffolding things that are happening along the way to the achievement of the outcome.
25:32
So A1 and A2 aren’t the things that you have to write outcomes around. You do have to write an outcome around A3 because that’s the ultimate achievement of the learning outcome. So just think about that.
25:45
There’s some things that are on the way to achieving the outcome that you can put in the session. They’re still totally relevant and they’re aligned with the outcome. You might even indicate that in your lesson plan, that those are things that are contributing towards the learners learning skills or gaining skills to be able to get there and to be able to achieve that final outcome, but it’s not actually the thing that’s the outcome itself.
26:10
That’s the A3 and it’s the final achievement or demonstration of the learner’s behaviour that’s related exactly to the outcome. And you remember, if you have an outcome, you have to have an activity around it.
26:23
And if you have an activity around it, you have to have an outcome around it. Often I see the misalignment and actually I create a table that we call an outcomes alignment table. And I literally put on the left column the outcomes, the middle column, the content that I’m seeing in the module that is related to that outcome.
26:44
And then the third is whether there’s an activity or assessment that’s also aligned with it. And if one of those things doesn’t line up, then that means that we have to have a conversation with the client about what their intention is.
26:56
If they’ve got an activity that doesn’t have an outcome, well, should there be an outcome around that? Maybe. Maybe we’ve got to write a new one in. But maybe it also means that activity shouldn’t be there because no, they don’t want to add another outcome.
27:10
And that activity actually isn’t something that we want to have anymore. The same thing, if they’ve got an outcome that doesn’t have an activity around it, well, do they still need the outcome? Sometimes clients say, “Oh yeah, no, that’s just a little five minute piece that I wanted to say.”
27:25
It’s like, well, if it’s a five minute piece that you wanted to say in a telling style to the learners, that’s not an outcome. If there’s no activity and you don’t think that there needs to be an activity, not an outcome.
27:36
This brings up another thing that’s related to outcomes alignment. And it has to do commonly with things like frameworks that have six elements to them or something like that, where sometimes we’ll see the client will say they want the learner to be able to name the six elements of the framework.
27:56
And that means that the learner has to memorize the six elements of the framework. But then they’ll tell us that they actually only need the learner to be able to discuss one of the elements and apply it to their own experience or something like that.
28:16
And so we have to say then,” Oh, so you mean the learners don’t have to name all six elements? You really want them to just choose one of the elements and apply it to their own experience?” “Yes,” the client will say.
28:29
And so these are discussions to help us kind of tease out what’s really needed in the situation. If the learners don’t need to name all six elements, then that’s not the outcome. The outcome could be more like, “Apply one of the six elements of the framework to your own experience”, or something like that.
28:48
And if we think about how we construct a learning outcome, which I didn’t talk about before, but I can talk about now, we actually have four parts of a learning outcome. And one of the parts comes into play here.
29:01
I use a framework, well, not just me, but a bunch of us around the world, [chuckles] use a framework called ABCD for crafting learning outcome statements: your audience, your behaviour, your condition, and your degree.
29:15
And this “one out of six” or “two out of six elements” or whatever this number is that you need people to reflect on, this is related to the degree. It’s often a number or a benchmark or a quality level or something like that that you can add into the statement for the learning outcome to be really, really clear about the degree the learner has to meet to be able to achieve that outcome.
29:42
So “name three out of six” enters the degree pieces into that, or “apply one of the six elements to your own experience” is also entering the degree into the learning outcome statement. The other pieces, I’ll back up to the C, the condition, that’s often something like, do they need a tool to be able to achieve the outcome statement, like a hammer in a physical sense or maybe a spreadsheet that they might use to create a budget?
30:15
Is there some sort of condition that they need to add in like a tool? Even to be able to do the thing outside and not indoors can be a condition. So conditions and degrees, sometimes we don’t actually see them in outcomes, especially if they haven’t been written by learning designers [chuckles] or instructional designers, but they might be things you can add in to be even more precise around the aligned activity or assessments that you’re putting in.
30:43
The first two pieces, A and B, A is just the audience and that for me comes into the stem. Remember we talked about the stem at the beginning? So by the end of the session, you will be able to, whatever, whatever, all of your learning outcome statements, “you” is talking directly to the learner and the learner is the audience as a group, of course.
31:05
The behaviour is the meat of the learning outcome, I guess I should say, and it usually is reflected in the one specific measurable verb that we have, and I talked about that earlier, things like apply, modify, detect, describe, list, state–
31:24
all of those things. If you’re really confused by verbs and you’re really not sure what to do about that, go on to my website, bcblearning.com. On my book page, I have downloadable PDFs that you can grab for verbs of the cognitive domain, the affective domain, and the psychomotor domain.
31:42
And they can help you, and I literally have one I’m looking at on my whiteboard right now as I record this episode, they can help you with your crafting of your learning outcome statements by having some verbs to look at.
31:55
And it really does help you think about things, looking at the array of possible verbs, to give you some ideas and to be really, really clear about the nature of the activity or the behaviour that you’re looking for.
32:08
So grab those verbs sheets, and hopefully they can help you when you go down to craft your actual statements. Actually, while you’re on my book page of my website, I think you should download the lesson plan template because using an actual lesson plan template where you put the learning outcomes at the top of your plan and you design in a table-based format accordingly, it can absolutely help you figure out how to design your session to the learning outcomes that you’ve stated and change them along the way and nuance them as I’ve said.
32:40
So using a lesson plan and identifying those draft outcomes are going to be really, really good for you, especially if you’re starting out lesson planning and you’re not quite sure how to do that. That’s the tool that I use specifically to help me stay real and grounded in identifying learning outcomes and then designing any type of a session accordingly.
33:02
Also, I wrote a whole chapter in my book around this, so if you want to grab Design to Engage, if this is really over your head, that is no problem at all. I wrote it for you and hopefully I was even more understandable in that book than I am here because, of course, I’m getting all excited about the topic and who knows if I’m making any sense at this point about learning outcomes! [laughs]
33:23
One of the last questions I got when I asked on social media about what I should address in this episode when I did the recording was how to share learning outcomes with participants. I think I talked about this in my book as well, but I’ll just say quickly that you don’t always have to share learning outcomes in the learning outcome format with participants, but you should share them somehow.
33:43
I think even if it’s a paragraph where you colloquially say the gist of what the learner is going to be able to get out of the workshop and what they importantly are going to be able to do, know, or value by the end of the workshop, that is really important for people to know.
33:58
Actually, it becomes a marketing activity as well. If you don’t put in your draft learning outcomes either as a bolded list or as some sort of paragraph where you talk about them a little bit more colloquially into your marketing materials, you’re doing your learners a disservice because you’re really not telling them what is going to change for them by the end of the session.
34:18
So align your marketing materials to your lesson planning and get it all straight. And yes, I would tell learners about learning outcomes either in an easier way that doesn’t look so formal or academic and just a paragraph or certainly a bulleted list if you have an audience where they’re very used to seeing learning outcomes and they want to know what they’re going to be able to get out of the experience.
34:42
I will say not everyone is as excited about learning outcomes as I am. [smiles] Some of your learners might not pay attention at all and they might not even care, but I want you to care because learning outcomes, as I started to say and hopefully have said all the way through, are the foundation to everything that you’re doing when you design your experience.
35:02
If you don’t care about learning outcomes, I don’t think that you’re doing your learners the service that you should be doing for them and creating the best and most effective course or workshop that you can.
35:16
So try to care a little bit more. Hopefully I’ve gotten you excited about them today. And as I said, feel free to reach out if you have any more questions. I’m wishing you all the best in your learning design work, whatever it means for you.
35:32
Coming up next on the podcast, I talk with two folks that work at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, Washington. I was there earlier this year with my family and I just loved what they were doing there.
35:44
And I was so curious about what learning looks like when you’re behind the scenes working at a museum. So Jessica Lane and Jacob McMurray join me for the next episode about museum learning. We get to dive into how they approach exhibit design, how they design and facilitate education programs for the community, locally there in Seattle and beyond.
36:06
It’s a great conversation that I’m happy to present to you. Until then. [Show outro] Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too.
36:23
To find the show notes, give me feedback or submit ideas for future episodes. Visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!
