Setting Objectives for Your Course

Setting objectives is a key element of any good course. It provides a roadmap for students and gives them a good idea of all the skills they’ll have once the course is over. That said, setting objectives isn’t as easy as making a list.

Suppose you are a corporation looking to make employee training videos. In that case, you want to educate newcomers on your brand and policies and need a way to make sure they have understood the material, asked all their questions, and are ready to apply these learnings to good use.

And that’s the case with any course! By setting clear milestones, you enable your students to monitor how well they’re doing, and you get a measurable way to determine their understanding of the material.

So when setting objectives, you want to stick to the tried and true SMART model.

The SMART Model

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timed

So instead of writing your goals like this:

At the end of this course, students will understand genre tropes and character and story arcs.

Try this:

Over the next 15 chapters in this course, you will learn to-

• Identify signs and symbols in film
• Identify key genre tropes and how certain films subvert them
• Identify character and story arc

These can be later applied to your own practice as you head into the next module, Screenwriting 101. The content of this course, along with additional readings, can be completed over the course of 8 weeks.

It all comes down to what your students should achieve at the end of the course. Should they be recalling facts and figures or be able to explain a product to a consumer?

Words like “understand” and “know” cannot be quantified, so avoid using them in your objectives statements. Words like “identify,” “draw upon,” and “apply” are much more useful!

So to give you another example, if you’re creating a course on investing in cryptocurrency, don’t write your objective as:

At the end of this course, you will know how to read charts and make informed decisions before investing in cryptocurrency.

Instead, give your viewers a glimpse of the tools they will learn to use so they can apply them for themselves. Like this!

During this course, you will learn:

• How to open an account and do your KYC when registering on an exchange platform
• Initial analysis when considering investing in a crypto asset
• Fundamental and technical analysis
• Trading psychology

Better, right? Buyers are more likely to click on a course that tells them exactly what they will learn, how they will learn it, and how long it will take.

Having a set of clear objectives also helps you, the instructor, provide relevant resources for students to go through after the course is done. To learn the importance of providing additional resources to your students at the end of the course, click here.

If you’re thinking of creating a course and need some guidance on structuring and scriptwriting, you can contact me through my website! I offer additional services like branding, animation, voice-over, and promotional content creation.