Reflection on learning outcomes

What do you think about these learning outcomes for an Emergency First Response course? 

• Define shock.
• Identify the signs and symptoms of shock. 
• List the common causes of shock.
• Discuss the importance of quickly diagnosing the patient's state of shock.
• Recognise and deal with a person in shock.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of writing learning outcomes that mean a little, if anything at all, to the learners. Let’s think about it for a moment. Are your learning outcomes knowledge-based or performance-based? Do you think your learners really care about your learning outcomes? If not, they might as well be learning goals and NOT learning outcomes. Learning goals and objectives generally describe what an instructor or program aims to do. Of course, as learning designers we need to map the content against these goals (given to us by the SMEs) to make sure everything learners need to know has been covered. But should we really put them in front of the learners? 

I think we can all agree that building Knowledge for its own sake has little value when it comes to solving a real-world problem and improving performance. Learning is a change in behaviour anyway, so the learning outcomes we write at the beginning of the courses should reflect that. Of course we need to “know” things in order to “do” something successfully – but only when the outcome of the learning is “doing” not “knowing”, we can say that learning has added value. I mean one may very well be able to discuss the importance of something without really being able to do it.

Getting back to the list I shared at the beginning of this post, only the last one is a meaningful action one should take in an emergency and hence that’s the only thing the learners care about. It’s therefore a good learning outcome. The other 4 items are learning goals—they’re what he learners need to know and should simply sit in the course content menu. What do you think?