KAREN SHAUP: I think the course level
objectives were pretty consistent,
when I started the course.
I knew what I wanted the course to offer students,
in terms of the content we would be investigating
and the skills that I wanted students
to be able to gain by taking the course.
So the sort of global objectives of the course
were stable from the beginning, and were
very similar to the types of course objectives
that I would create for a face-to-face class.
In the module objectives, I think I did struggle a bit
at first, to communicate how each module was
distinct from each other.
And many of my module objectives were activities, rather than
learning objectives, initially.
So I think that part of the process
was figuring out what the activities were going
to be, whether they were discussion board
activities, or response paper activities,
and then tying those activities back
to the sort of global learning objectives,
but also sort of making clear to the students,
which particular objective we were focusing on
for that particular module.
And this has really helped me in my face-to-face classes now,
as well, in terms of communicating with students
what the learning objectives are, in terms
of the different activities that we're doing in class,
or the different writing assignments.
Again, I think with a humanities course,
some of the global learning objectives
remain sort of consistent throughout the whole course.
But really communicating to students
what the specific learning objective we're focusing on
for a module, or for a particular assignment,
was a really helpful way of organizing the class content
and communicating to the students what
made this particular assignment different from, or kind
of similar to, other assignments that we
were doing, how it all fit into the overall purpose
of the class.