ILO diagram: a novel conceptual model of intended learning outcomes

Abstract

Achieving intended learning outcomes (ILOs) in education is an ongoing topic within distance learning and educational communities. The term "ILOs" has been introduced to indicate what learners will be able to do by the end of the course of study. Developing the ILO structure, in which the subject matter and their relationships are integrated with the capabilities to be learned, is a challenge to instructional designers. In this research, the ILO diagram – a novel conceptual model of intended learning outcomes – is proposed to support not only instructional designers in designing and developing courses of study, but also learners and instructors in performing the courses' learning and teaching activities.

The research covers three objectives. First, in order to pioneer courses of study which should consider all stakeholders in education, the research aims primarily to reconcile constructivist and instructivist theories in order to propose an equivalent architecture, using ILOs to support learning and teaching. Second, more significantly, the research aims to contribute a novel conceptual model of ILOs (called an ILO diagram) using a diagrammatic technique. In the ILO diagram, ILO nodes are represented as the two-dimensional classification of a performance/content matrix based on the component display theory proposed by Merrill. The ILO relationships have formulated the hierarchical structure using the cognitive hierarchy comprising six levels adopted the Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain. Moreover, three types of the principal relationship, two types of the composite relationship, and three relationship constraints are proposed. Finally, the third objective of the research is to experimentally ascertain how the structured ILOs format conceptualised through the proposed ILO diagram can contribute to both teaching and learning.

Furthermore, the three experimental studies were conducted to explore whether providing the well-defined structure of ILOs, conceptualised through the ILO diagram, can facilitate teaching and learning. In the first experiment, the main aim was to investigate the instructors’ satisfaction with using the ILO diagram in teaching. The results revealed that the proposed ILO diagram met the instructors’ satisfactions with higher ratings for perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and attitude towards representing ILOs than the plain-text document. The second experiment was to investigate whether using the ILO diagram to facilitate learning can support learners to indicate the learning paths. The results revealed that the mean completeness of all learning paths was statistically significantly higher with the structured ILOs (ILO diagram), showing that the learners benefited from the ILO diagram in performing their self-regulated learning. Finally, the last experiment was to investigate how well the learners understand the conceptual representation of the ILO diagram. The results of the experiment revealed that the average mean of understandability for the conceptual representation of the ILO diagram was higher than for both the sentential and tabular representations. These findings indicate that the ILO diagram provides more understandability than the sentential and tabular representational styles of ILOs.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

Catalogue record

Export record