Reflection on how to write the learning outcomes for an online programming course for teachers

Abstract

The EU Commission for Higher Education through the Bologna Process declaration has put into action a series of reforms. One of the reforms is the development of learning outcomes in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). As part of these reforms, European universities are required to identify and describe the learning outcomes students will achieve after attending a course or program. There is no accurate way of writing learning outcomes, and there seems to be an indistinctly use of terms when explaining outcomes (1). This can naturally cause some possible confusions in relation to what learning outcomes should consist of, and make it difficult to write learning outcomes for a course or a program. This paper presents a reflection on how the learning outcomes might be written and considerations that need to be taken in the writing process, based on literature and framework used across Europe. In this paper, the online course Applied programming, targeted to teachers in secondary school, is used as an example for this purpose.