2.4 How to Specify Objectives, Activities and Injects

Our experience shows that solid specification makes exercise preparation much simpler—it works like a plan. You will iterate even during preparation, but you'll have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and what you will evaluate.

This section guides you toward creating an exercise specification like the one in Section 2.1. The probability of creating a sound exercise depends on your knowledge of previous sections and completing the foundational work from Phase 01: Understand. If you skipped everything and want to start here, we need to warn you—this will significantly decrease your chances of creating something meaningful and useful.

How to do it

There are plenty of learning design methodologies with various levels of complexity. We strive for a minimalistic and functional approach. If you follow this process, you will create a sound first specification.

Note

We recommend working on exercise specification with a team. The minimum is an exercise designer and subject matter expert. Reality is that even this can be difficult, so at least establish feedback mechanisms.

Start with brain dump

Put everything you already know somewhere visible. We recommend using collaboration tools like Miro or Canva Board. You can also use a flip chart or paper.

A side note on format: our experience shows that structured formats like tables don't work well for this step. You spend ages thinking about categorization instead of getting ideas out. The goal is to refresh the information and make it visually available, not to organize it perfectly.

Include what you know about the exercise need, your trainees, relevant information you discovered during Phase 01: Understand, and any ideas you already have.

Specify WHAT the Exercise Will Actually Deliver and its Learning Objectives

This step will help you significantly in specifying outcomes and Learning Objectives for their reaching. Imagine explaining to a future trainee what they will actually get from the exercise—insight into a problem, gained knowledge, practiced skills.

Make your outcomes:

Connected to learning – Skip everything else like "you will comply with policy requirements."
Specific – Vague formulations like "you will understand the legal, economic and technical aspects of cybersecurity" are useless.
Aligned with exercise need – Each outcome should directly address the need you identified in Phase 01.

Phone Loss exercise

The need was to increase the chance that people prepare for and respond to phone loss correctly.

"Bob, this exercise will deliver these exact things for you:

You will realize how significant the consequences of phone loss might be
You will know the best approach to react immediately to phone loss
You will understand what specific protective measures you should have to minimize risks
You will create a plan for implementing those measures
You will apply 2 technical measures directly during the exercise
You will discuss the experiences with other trainees"

When you specify outcomes this clearly, you can validate two things:

Before the exercise: If we are 100% successful transferring this to Bob, does the exercise really address the identified need?
After the exercise: How does Bob perceive we were successful in transferring this to him?

Based on your outcomes, you can simply specify Learning Objectives (LOs)—what trainees should learn or practice to achieve them. LOs are the basic units that give structure to the entire exercise. Most exercises contain one to five Learning Objectives. Each LO breaks down into concrete Learning Activities in the next step. We suggest using the Bloom's Taxonomy for Computing for defining them.

The previous outcomes would look like this when transformed into LOs:

LO1 (Remember): Trainees will be able to list the correct steps to take immediately after a phone is lost.
LO2 (Understand): Trainees will explain the serious risks and consequences that come with losing a mobile device.
LO3 (Apply): Trainees will set up two specific technical security measures on their devices during the exercise.
LO4 (Analyze): Trainees will identify which protective measures are most important for their specific needs based on shared experiences with others.
LO5 (Create): Trainees will prepare a personal action plan to improve their phone security after the exercise.

Supplementary method: Task Analysis — When you intuitively don't know what the outcomes should be, use this method. It will help you analyze actions and decisions that people take to perform a task, which includes identifying the knowledge needed to support those actions and decisions. In relation to the exercise need, you will identify necessary tasks and then decompose them to the level where you know exactly what should be delivered in the exercise. This method is very helpful if conducted with a subject matter expert. Check the step-by-step guide in this FAO e-learning free book (p. 33–36).

Specification of Learning Activities and Injects

Previous steps gave you solid understanding of learning objectives. Now it is time to specify the following two core elements of your exercise.

Learning Activities (LAs) are what trainees actually do—observable actions connected to the platform. Each Learning Objective should contain 1–5 Learning Activities. These are tasks realized with platform features described in Section 2.3.

Use action verbs to frame activities clearly: Identify, Search, Summarize, Predict, Decide, Estimate, Compare, Examine, Present, Implement, Act out, Break down, Argue, Negotiate, Criticize, Reflect, Review, Write, Solve. More verbs at Bloom's for Computing – last page.

These verbs give different context and purpose to platform features—"Identify threats in the log file" feels different from "Summarize threats for executive briefing" even though both might use similar platform features.

Injects are information or tasks that move the story forward. They give trainees context, insights, direct instructions, or feedback. Injects trigger Learning Activities—without them, trainees wouldn't know what to do or when. Injects are realized with platform features described in Section 2.3. If you are looking for inspiration, check our bonus section – 2.6 Inspiration Catalogue.

Two Approaches to Drafting

You might wonder what order makes sense—should you start with LOs, break them into LAs, then create injects? Or start with injects that tell a story, then derive activities from them?

Top-down approach (LOs → LAs → Injects): You start with clear learning objectives, decompose them into specific activities trainees need to practice, then create injects to trigger those activities. This approach works well when you have clear training requirements or when working from competency frameworks. The challenge is to connect everything into something coherent.
Bottom-up approach (Injects → LAs → LOs): Many designers intuitively start with injects because they're thinking about the story. You build the narrative and then organize activities around it. Then you return to defined LOs and check if they actually align with the need. This approach works well when you have a strong scenario vision or when working with subject matter experts who know exactly what should happen.

Learning objectives, learning activities, and injects are strongly connected. You'll iterate their specification several times. You might start top-down, realize an activity needs better context, adjust the inject, discover that changes the activity sequence, which requires refining the objective. Or you might start bottom-up with a compelling scenario, realize it doesn't address your learning objectives, and restructure objectives to align better.

Exercise Specification: Visual Draft

Now you have everything you need to create an exercise specification that will really help you prepare the exercise you want. We advise you to visualize the ideal chain of events in the exercise. At the end you should have something very similar to what we described as an example in Section 2.1.

There is a very simple visual syntax:

Circle – Start of the flow of actions
Rhombus – Milestone or action in the platform taken by trainee
Rectangle – Inject sent to the trainee

Don't overthink the visualization—the main goal is to help with exercise preparation. There's no single correct chain of events—design what serves your training goals. However, we strongly recommend double-checking the final version with information in Section 2.2 Milestone Logic.

Also, it is perfectly fine if the preparation phase leads to further iterations of the specified concept. This is the natural result of spending more time and more focused thinking on the scenario—mistakes are discovered, and innovative approaches are found.