The first step in course design is determining just what it is your students should learn in the course, and expressing those as learning objectives. You can use Bloom's Taxonomy as a great tool for formulating your objectives.
The knowledge dimension of Bloom's Taxonomy posits four types of knowledge:
Factual - knowledge of ground-level, brute facts, like what the temperature is outside right now.
Conceptual - knowledge of relationships among facts, or understanding of why the facts are the case, such as knowing why the temperature is what it is (presumably having something to do with air pressure, axial tilt, and a bunch of stuff I do not understand).
Procedural - knowlege of how to do something, such as how to use a thermometer (or your phone!) to measure temperature.
Metacognitive - knowledge about cognition in general, such as knowing well enough how you learn so that you can determine whether you would need to take a class, or just browse through some readings or videos or something in order to learn new things.
The cognitive process dimension of Bloom's Taxonomy posits several levels at which students can demonstrate their knowledge. From simplest to most complex, these are:
Remember - the ability to retrieve knowledge from memory
Understand - the ability to see connections between facts, to go beyond the mere remembering of details, to explain why the facts are what they are
Apply - the ability to use knowledge to solve problems or perform some activity
Analyze - the ability to divide a concept into parts, or bring parts together into a whole, including knowing what would happen if you took away or changed a part
Evaluate - the ability to make good judgments based on appropriate criteria
Create - the ability to take everything you know and do something new with it
My definitions above are somewhat crude and definitely incomplete. I encourage you to explore Bloom's Taxonomy in detail (some resources are suggested below, but you can always do an Internet search and find more than you could ever want).
Putting your knowledge of both dimensions of the taxonomy together, you can produce learning objectives of the standard form:
you will be able to [verb]{noun phrase}
... where the verb represents the appropriate level of performance on the cognitive process dimension and the noun phrase represents the exact knowledge you want them to know, categorized in part by the knowledge dimension. Examples:
You will be able to design an experiment to...
You will be able to define logical vocabulary.
You will want to consider the previous experience of your students and the level of your course when choosing your learning objectives. Generally, the ability to perform at the higher levels requires some ability to perform at the lower levels. It may be inappropriate to ask beginner students to perform at too high a level, or to expect advanced students to spend a lot of time on simpler objectives.
Here is a subset of my slides that includes the cognitive process dimension as a pyramid and charts to help you understand and use both dimensions.
This is a resource list for the workshop series. Relevant to writing learning objectives, you will find a link to an interactive Bloom's Taxonomy chart, and also a link to an old video of me going over Bloom's Taxonomy.
