Defining Episode Objectives
Last updated on 2024-06-26 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 35 minutes
Overview
Questions
- How should objectives be written for a smaller part of a whole lesson?
- How are objectives added to an episode page?
Objectives
After completing this episode, participants should be able to…
- Define learning objectives for a section of a lesson.
- Format objectives in the individual pages of a lesson website.
In Defining Lesson Objectives, you created a list of the learning objectives for your lesson as a whole. This process is helpful as a way to set the end goal and, coupled with the expected prior knowledge of the target audience you identified, describe the scope of the lesson.
We can use the same approach for the individual episodes of a lesson, defining objectives for the episode to make clear what we intend to teach in that section. Defining these objectives before writing the episode content helps us to:
- stay focused in the episode, without spending time on non-essential topics
- determine whether learners are attaining the skills we wish to teach them (we will discuss this more in the next two episodes)
- summarise the skills the learner can expect to gain by following this section of the lesson
As before, here are some recommendations to help you define these episode-level objectives:
- Aim for 2-4 objectives per episode. If you need to write more than that, consider breaking this section down into multiple episodes.
- To ensure your episode content aligns with the overall goals for the lesson, try to identify which lesson-level objective(s) your episode will contribute to.
- In the context of the previous recommendation, consider how the objectives for your episode fit as a component of the higher-level skills/understanding defined in the lesson-level objective(s).
Exercise: define objectives for your episode (30 minutes)
- Using the same approach as you did for your whole-lesson objectives, define a set of SMART objectives for your chosen episode. (15 minutes)
- Add this list of objectives to replace the
TODOin theobjectivesfenced div of your episode file (5 minutes) - Compare your list with those created by your collaborators on the
lesson:
- are there any gaps in these objectives, i.e. anything that should be covered in these episodes but is not captured in the objectives?
- are there any overlaps, i.e. anything that looks like it will be covered more than once?
- As a group, discuss how you will address any problems identified in the previous step, and edit your objectives accordingly.
After you have defined the episode objectives, you can add them to
the objectives div as follows:
The
Workbench Component Guide provides a full list of all the different
classes of fenced div that can be included using the lesson
infrastructure. The guide specifies which divs are required for an
episode (objectives, questions, and
keypoints), and which are optional.
Now that we have defined objectives for our episodes, we can start working on the next step in developing an effective lesson: designing exercises that will assess whether a learner has learned what you aimed to teach them.
Optional Homework: Reflection Exercise (not included in timing)
Take some time to think back on what has been covered so far, then make some notes on the most important points and actions you want to take away from that. The Trainers and other participants will not look at this - it is only for you.
If you do not know where to start, consider the following list for a starting point:
- draw a concept map, connecting the material
- draw pictures or a comic depicting one of the concepts covered
- write an outline of the topics we covered
- write a paragraph or “journal” entry about your experience of the training today
- write down one thing that struck you the most