A goal is a clearly stated word, phrase or description of what you hope to achieve through your eLearning course. Without a goal or goals, users can quickly misinterpret the reasoning behind your course. They may ask themselves “Why am I taking this course?” “What was I supposed to be learning about?” You end up wasting people’s time and money creating a generic, poorly though out eLearning course. Not only that, but if you don’t take your goals seriously, your user’s aren’t going to learn a single concept.

Also on the development end, without a clearly structured set of goals you’ll have little to fall back on if you get confused or want to add a new topic or feature. With a solid set of goals you can refer new ideas and project process back to a clearly stated list of objectives. If your new idea or direction doesn’t match up to that list, chances are it would dilute the effectiveness of your course.

Creating a Project Goal

When creating your project goal, the end result should immediately show what the topic to be covered is, the purpose of the course, as well as what success in understanding the topic will allow a learner to do. In other words a goal will show:

Topic to be covered (Goal Overview)

Simply put, what is the topic? If your course is on engine repair, then the act of repairing an engine, or learning about engine repair is your topic.

Method of gaining comprehension (Goal Specifics)

How will the user learn about the topic? Perhaps you think the best way for users to learn about engine repair is through a virtual engine repairing simulation.

Reason for learning (Goal Reason)

Why does the developer or user need to learn this information? Remember back in grade school where teachers would tempt you with a gold star or some horrible piece of stale candy for doing a good job? You as a developer need a reason to be producing the course, and your user needs a reason to be taking the course. Whether it’s simply to gain general knowledge, better understand a situation, prepare someone for a real life experience, and so on. There are an infinite number of reasons to learn any one topic, you just need to find out what the reason is.

Development Goals

Continuing to play with the engine repair situation, here’s an idea of a development goal.

Goal Overview: Our goal is to develop a course on the maintenance and repair of small car engines.

Goal Specifics: We will achieve our goal through simulation, allowing users to interact with virtual tools in a garage-like environment where they will gain first hand experience on maintaining an engine.

Goal Reason: Upon completion of the course, the user will have better knowledge of the following: Changing Oil, Maintaining Spark Plugs. Once successfully completed, the user will be allowed to work in a real garage.

The reason I call the above a development goal, is that it reflects what you hope to achieve through the development process. Whenever you’re in doubt of whether a new topic, interaction or plot point will make sense in your course, refer it back to your goal. If it doesn’t make sense (for example: changing a tire would not fit under engine maintenance) then get rid of it!

Additional types of development goals stray a little off of the topic being taught, but can be equally important to the success of a project. These goals include but are not limited to:

Structural Goals: File naming conventions, production processes, work delegation.
Graphic & Layout Goals: Determining graphical styles, various layouts, color schemes, text sizes and fonts.
Usability & Target Audience Goals: Designing interface and content delivery systems with your target audience in mind.

User Goals

Your users don’t need to be aware of your full development goal; it’s a little too complex and unnecessary. To define your user goal, you can simplify the lengthy development goal from the engine example above into the following.

This course will guide you through various engine maintenance techniques.

There are other bits of information the user should know, such as time the course will take, will they be scored and so on, but the meat of the goal is clearly defined in one sentence. People tend to respond better and are more open to learning with a proper easy to understand introduction. Tell your user what they’re about to do, walk them through a situation, then explain what they just did, all centered around your goal.