RadioJames

One of the things that some new instructors that I work with struggle with, is writing traditional performance-based course and lesson objectives. I know that for myself it wasn’t until I entered my MA in education that I even became aware of their purpose in instruction, so when you consider that many adjunct and even full time College level teachers/professors have not been exposed to teaching education it’s no surprise (and certainly no fault ).

http://www.radiojames.com/work/ObjectivesBuilder/StartPage.html

Since I work with online teachers to design instruction for their online courses, and since most of the instructors I support are remote from campus, I decided to develop an online tool for writing objectives so that when we work together remotely the tool could serve as an interactive example for writing objectives that the instructor could then use independently after words.

What it does:
The tool and allows an instructor to select a level of student performance (Bloom’s level of intellectual performance) via a drop down menu. When a selection is made, info related to the choice is pulled into the interface from an external XML document which includes:

• An overview of the knowledge level selected
• A List of corresponding verbs that when selected populate a text editor so that the instructor can write objectives directly
• A set of example objectives to get ideas on how to structure an objective
• A text editor for writing/printing objectivesWhy?
  My hope is that the tool will act as a useful resource for instructors writing or revising course materials. There are a lot of excellent websites and resources for learning to write objectives, but I haven’t seen alot of interactive web-based tools for creating them. I’m not sure if it has value for the larger .edu community, but if so that’d be great.