Working with Learning Objectives

Within the Cirrus platform you can easily add Learning Objectives to any item to help you create assessments that include the correct question criteria to help evaluate your learners progress and competency levels. Learning Objectives help you to use the right questions to assess or evaluate your learners progress or level.

What are Learning Objectives?

Definitions:

A learning objective relates to the ability, skill, attitude, understanding or knowledge that a candidate is expected to learn or achieve at the end of a specific course or instruction. In other words: “that what a student is expected to learn”. [Wiktionary]

Inversely, it describes what an item (a question) aims to assess and can also be used by authors (teachers) to measure how well they’ve succeeded in in teaching their learners on specific topics. [Wikipedia]

So why set Learning Objectives?

It helps both students and teachers to make progress measurable and provide insights on the learning material and learning approach.

“Usually an educational objective relates to gaining an ability, a skill, some knowledge, a new attitude et cetera rather than having merely completed a given task.” [Wikipedia].

Setting up Learning Objectives within your organisation

The uniform structuring and the carefully thinking on your organisation's goals and the related Learning Objectives is vital. Depending on the level of granularity they can be shared between colleagues of the same department or on the same subject matter. 

Organisation of Learning Objectives in Cirrus:

Management and structuring of Learning Objectives in Cirrus

Cirrus offers you full flexibility when organising your Learning Objectives. They are organised in repositories and grouped in so-called Subjects. Cirrus offers the option to

• Publish / depublish sets of learning objectives that are no longer in use.
• Set which users can what Learning Objectives - especially useful for large organisation with a diverse portfolio.

Read all about this in our article on 'Management of Learning Objectives in Cirrus'. You can build your own structure, bearing in mind the following:

Creating your own Learning Objectives: Import versus Manual creation

You can easily import Learning Objectives using an Excel sheet as source file.

Alternatively you can manually create Learning Objectives via Admin > Learning Objectives.

Please note that when manually adding Learning Objectives to a repository you will need to provide a required / mandatory ID for each Learning Objective. This is OK if you’re adding the odd individual Learning Objective, if you need to add more we recommend using the import of Learning Objectives.

Application of Learning Objectives in Cirrus

Adding Learning Objectives to your Items

The Learning Objective(s) is part of the item settings when editing the item. See assigning a Learning Objective to an item.

Creating an assessment using a blueprint: Learning Objectives are required

Note: If your assessments will be created using a blueprint, you will need to assign a Learning Objective and a Taxonomy term to each item that should be included.

Application: using Learning Objectives in your Score Report

Please read all about this in our article on 'Reports: using the the Score Report'.

Evaluating Learning Objectives

A non performing Learning Objective can mean a change to the educational plan: do I need to teach or explain differently so students will perform better?

A learning objective can only be evaluated on the basis of the activity related to the questions (items) linked to that learning objective. There are two ways of doing that:

Per candidate via Score Report

At the individual candidate level, a Score Report can be enabled per exam - giving feedback to candidates and/or their teachers on how well they performed on the specific Learning Objectives within a given assessment.

For a group, per schedule

You can evaluate Learning Objectives also per schedule for one or more candidate when using our results export.

Go to Reports > Candidate Results > Select one or more candidates > Export to Excel > Choose 'Candidate Results'.

Result: the Learning Objectives will be visible in the export file.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Do you have any questions? First read our FAQ on importing Learning Objectives. If the answer you are looking for is not there, please do not hesitate to mail servicedesk@cirrusassessment.com.