If you’re like the rest of the world, your organization has tightened the purse strings during the downturn, which means it’s more difficult than ever to make the business case for professional
development. It’s no longer enough to
attend an event based solely on the
location, the speakers or the education
sessions. In order to send you, senior
managers now demand measurable
results, too.
If that’s your situation, it is most
likely your members’ situation, too,
which begs the question: How do you
develop education that both your members and their managers will value?
Ultimately, it’s all about “
outcomes.” In a world of ROI and ROO, the
word has been kicked around plenty.
And yet, it still seems to baffle many
association professionals, whose “if
you build it they will come” attitude
persists. With today’s shrinking budgets
and growing competition, however, one
thing’s clear: You owe your members
more, and outcomes-based objectives
deliver.
Defining Outcomes-Based
Objectives
Outcomes-based objectives allow participants in education sessions to discern if an activity meets their individual
needs. Appropriate objectives should
state the behavior that is expected after
the educational intervention.
The obvious first step to creating
outcomes-based objectives for your
event is identifying members’ needs or
knowledge gaps with questions such as:
• Why did your program planners
choose the topic?
• How do you decide what your audience needs?
• Have you drilled down enough to
know the “why” of a particular
topic?
• Have any barriers been identified
and addressed?
• Have you discussed how change may
be limited?
All of these questions must be
weighed before objectives are devel-
oped. Members — and the data you
collect from them — provide the desti-
nation, which is their learning objective,
and your job is giving them the roadmap
that gets them there.
Creating Outcomes-Based
Objectives
Once you have collected data and
defined gaps, you‘ll be able to map
out the sequence in which you want to
present and teach information. At that
point, you’re ready to create the objectives.
Critically analyzing the wording of
outcomes-based objectives is key to
the transfer of knowledge. This drives
how a participant selects offerings, how
the activities are designed and how the
content is packaged, delivered and mar-
keted. After all, objectives drive activi-
ties’ “level of learning.”
The measure of an outcome focused
on defining or recalling information
should be different from an outcome
expecting learners to apply the knowl-
edge and generate a plan. If the content
or the audience is new, objectives may
use verbs such as defines, describes,
identifies and recalls. A mid-level activ-
ity, meanwhile, may use the words
applies, analyzes and distinguishes.
Finally, a high-level activity may focus
on words such as concludes, discrimi-
nates, generates and designs. These
word choices drive the learning format
and evaluation of your activity.
“Education today is about what our
members actually do in practice, and
all aspects of an educational activity
should line up around this concept,”
says Rebecca DeVivo, senior director of
education and training at the American
Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.
“In other words, identifying a practice
gap is what our members need to be
able to do, outcomes-based objectives
state what they will be able to do fol-
lowing the activity, an evaluation asks
participants what they plan to do dif-
ferently as a result of the activity and
a follow-up evaluation asks what they
actually did. If you’ve identified your
practice gaps and objectives appropri-
ately, it should all fall into place.”
Outcomes in Action
An updated version of Bloom’s taxonomy (see p. 30) — a famous classification of learning objectives originally
created in 1956 by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom — shows a
more active form of thinking, matching
up cognitive domains with appropriate
verbs that can help association professionals design outcomes-based learning
objectives.
For example, pretend that a needs
assessment and gap analysis indicate
that a third of your members need
basic information on a new procedure;
another third understand the basic
information, but are not sure how to
apply it to their daily work; and the
remaining group understands the basic
information and application, but has
identified barriers to implementation.
These are three very different groups
with different needs but a single identified knowledge gap. Designing one
presentation that covers all of those
areas would not meet the needs of 66
percent of the audience at any given
point in the presentation. For the first
group, therefore, educational planners
may develop a hybrid education session
— part webinar, part face-to-face session — using words such as explain and
summarize because the learners need
to understand; for the second group,
planners might create an activity where
learners analyze the information and
brainstorm how to apply it, focusing on
words like discover and solve in pursuit
of application; and for the third group,
planners might engineer a performance
improvement activity that allows learn-
