Research

Join us for a seminar with Dan Larsen.

Dan contends that the "ILO", a term that dates from the 2000s, replicates in full "behavioural objectives" of the 1960s—an idea that briefly became US educational orthodoxy by the late 1960s, but was then ferociously attacked and became widely seen as discredited by the 1970s. By the 1990s, however, this history had already become misremembered and/or forgotten across the educational field, and the idea returned, now under the nomenclature of "learning outcomes". It was then imposed on UK universities by government regulators in aftermath of the 1997 Dearing Report.

"Constructive Alignment", Dan contends, is not actually one theory, but two. The very poorly understood original theory, published in an article in 1996, was novel and interesting, and deeply rooted intellectually in the constructivist educational thinking of the 1980s and 1990s. In the crucial 2007 third edition of Teaching for Quality Learning at University, however, Biggs and Tang adopted the ILO as the centerpiece of their thinking—in large part to adjust the theory to match what had become widespread regulatory practice. Without realizing what they had done, they gutted the intellectual foundations of Biggs' original theory, and replaced it in toto with 1960s-era educational thinking. This 2007 confluence of educational theory and regulatory practice established the educational orthodoxy that has dominated higher education ever since.

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First published: 29 September 2026