Rob, it is hard work to get SMEs to move away from knowledge dump. But they’re motivated to become experts, so it works for them; not necessarily for their audiences. It does take more responsibility on the part of the ID to fight for meaningful objectives, not just accept what’s given, but it’s so worth it when the learner has an experience that they realize is valuable. But it can take patience!

People like the idea that you can run once through a process — any process — and emerge with great results. Here on earth, though, early efforts can help us rethink assumptions, means, and even goals.

I once spent a lot of time working on an orientation program for new salespeople at my employer. The biggest breakthrough came about a third of the way through development, when we realized that the overarching metaphor was not “a day in the life” of a sales rep, but a deal in the life… because the salespeople always thought in terms of a deal, which by its nature might stretch over weeks.

I have no disagreement at all with your “situated objective.” (In my post, I was giving examples of how Bloom’s stuff makes sense for someone who thought it had no merit whatsoever.)

Your point about affecting the bottom line connects will with Gilbert’s concept of worthy performance (not that this is news to you) — the whole idea of learning at work is ultimately to increase the value of the results that people achieve.

It takes a lot of trust from the SME’s to follow this process to develop objectives,
they have been in learning events before, there was an outline and an info dump.
That worked for them so it shoulod work for everyone.

Changing the point of SME’s involvelment to performance on the job
not completion of thier info dump into a course is something I am trying to improve.
Does anyone have any success stories?
Rob Bartlett

Many of my students balk at the question, “what do you want them to be able to do at the end of the lesson? How will they use what they learn?” Until we begin to get some better assessment tools, though, (something better than objective before and after tests) that are cost effective and long term, few people will focus on creating objectives the way you have outlined them.

This is why when I teach distance learning ID, I begin with asking my students what they would like to do better in their classroom. In other words, what are the students not doing that they would like to see them do better (note that it is not what knowledge do they have and should they acquire). From there we spend a lot of time crafting the learning objectives. The next step is to develop an assessment tool (rather than the activity itself). Often, in the process of developing the assessment tool, the objectives are modified and fine-tuned. This makes the ID much easier to develop.