lLOs and their effective formulation

When planning to revise your course or part of it, the first step is to identify the outcomes you want students to achieve, the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs). ILOs underpin the design of meaningful, value-added assessment tasks and teaching and learning activities. Applying the concept of constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003) will support you in ensuring the consistency between intended learning outcomes, assessment and teaching and learning activities.

WHAT ARE ILOS?

ILOs express what the learner is expected to know and realistically be able to do after the completion of a unit of study. ILOs should have characteristics that can be identified in the “be SMART” model: 

• Specific: sufficiently detailed;
• Measurable: the assessment of the achievement of the ILOs must be possible at the end or during the course;
• Assignable: can be formulated and communicated in an understandable way;
• Realistic: consistent;
• Time (related to time): achievable within the times planned for the course. 
  

Why are ilos so important?

ILOs guide you in ensuring the design of meaningful, value-added assessment tasks and teaching and learning activities.

How to formulate effective ilos

An effective and well-formulated ILOs should contain a verb, an object, the context and criteria for achieving proficiency. See a hands-on example:

What do we need to consider when integrating soft skills in intended learning outcomes?

A good way to begin this process is:

1. Selecting soft and/or digital skills you want to develop or improve in your students. As indicated in week 1, we suggest you use the eLene4work framework, at least as a first step, as it contains a selection of the soft and digital skills most demanded in the EU by employers, graduates and novice workers. When talking about soft and digital soft skills many nuances exist and it would be useful to explore them so you can ensure that they best meet your learning objectives. They are suitable to be applied in learning interventions, at lesson or module level. Here some examples of frameworks that discuss these skills: 

• the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO), outlines thousands of occupations and skills establishing a common language to help bridge the communication gaps between different countries and domains of employment, education and training;
• the European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp), focuses on digital skills; 
• the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu) that distinguishes six different areas in which educators’ Digital Competence is expressed;
  

  At a higher level (think about a degree course), it’s important to keep in mind two additional frameworks:

  • key competences for lifelong learning, 
  • the Dublin Descriptors. 

Rethinking your original course ILOs: Consider your current courses or modules within courses. It may be useful to identify the part of the course (a whole module or a lesson) that may benefit from a redesign. This may be because there is an area of content that requires richer content to support a deeper understanding for the students or because you want them to be more engaged, and thereby the mode of instruction needs adjusting. In either case, you would start with revising the existing ILO: to verify their effectiveness in terms of active learning methods integration and unpack them to highlight soft skills. Rethinking about ILOs can be done also at curricular level, as described by Ritter (2018). As an example:

ORIGINAL ILO

Students will become familiar with the living organisms kingdoms. inventory control models.

Reworked ilo + ilos in terms of soft and digital skills

Knowledge: students will be able to describe the main characteristics of the 5 living organisms kingdoms;
Soft skills: students will be able to orally present to the class, in a short time, a synthetic description of one of the Kingdom illustrating its main characteristics and to work together in teams in the online learning community in order to tackle complex inventory control problems.
Digital skills: students will be able to identify, organise and analyse digital information about the assigned Kingdom, judging its relevance and purpose and to prepare to develop the description of one Kingdom through an online tool 

Formulating ILOs thinking at the performance effectively: the revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl 2001) can support you in selecting the most suitable verb for your ILOs. Here below few verbs for each level of thinking are proposed as example.

   Download the infographics

REFERENCE

• Anderson, L.W. (Ed.), Krathwohl, D.R. (Ed.), Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E., Pintrich, P.R., Raths, J., & Wittrock, M.C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Complete edition). New York: Longman. A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing : a revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives : complete edition

• Biggs, J. B. (2003). Teaching for Quality Learning at University. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.

• Ritter, B. A., Small, E. E., Mortimer, J. W., & Doll, J. L. (2018). Designing management curriculum for workplace readiness: Developing students’ soft skills. Journal of Management Education, 42(1), 80-103. Designing management curriculum for workplace readiness: Developing students’ soft skills

For additional references and supporting research please visit Bibliography page.