So thinking about assessment of objectives this week, I find myself on a familiar rant:  that it's pretty much only in formal education that we lose sight of how learning is going to be assessed.  For example, if I set out to teach someone how to bake a cake or drive a car, I know exactly what the "proof of the pudding" will be!  Even that figure of speech implies obvious ways to assess something!  But so often in formal education we see how much of the content we cover *before* we decide what all is included in the assessment.  In a sense this is only fair, since a history teacher shouldn't test over the Civil War is she didn't even get to it in the course.  But in another sense, this approach, though seemingly linear and logical to those immersed in the schools, is illogical, especially to anyone doing any "teaching" in the "real" world.  If you want my help with getting your snowblower started, the proof of the pudding is whether you can start it, not a knowledge test on whatever I happen to cover in our Saturday morning bull session!  So in my grad curriculum courses I've tended to really emphasize out-of-school examples to shake our thinking out of the "coverage" approach and toward the "what's the point" approach. 
Another, related, issue I really struggle with is how much of an expert am I supposed to be in an online course?  In online learning, there's not much room for direct instruction.  But I was trained and hired to be a content expert.  Switching from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side seems to have additional challenges in the online environment since there's no place to pull everyone back together and "correct" misconceptions or provide the "right answers."  Ed and I joke about our F2F students in philosophy of ed going through the motions of group work and other learning activities but assuming eventually the prof will stand up and give the right answers or "fill in the chart" for them.  Despite all our resistance to this and philosophical opposition to it, the system has really trained us and our students to eventually revert, even if only for a few minutes at the end of each class period, to a sage on the stage announcing the right answers after all the group work, etc. 
I took a philosophy of ed quiz recently, and I had a three-way tie with the philosophies that are most student-centered.  But on the other hand, I'm also proud of my hard work in grad school and in developing my courses.  I'm aware that in the end the success of a course is on my head, not my students' heads.  I'm aware that my transcripts are looked at before I'm assigned specific courses to teach.  I feel confident and passionate about my areas of expertise and expect to be able to decide which areas to hit hardest in each of my courses -- in other words, coverage!  Yet, on the totally other hand, I can't conceive of "lecturing" a lot of extraneous info when teaching someone to sail a boat.  Even though I've thoroughly researched the physics of sailing angles and the history of small boat sailing (see my 1997 online animations of sailing pointers:  http://www.huntington.edu/Education/Sailing-Lessons/), I don't think I'd feel those more heady things had to be in a "curriculum" of a how-to course on the basics of sailing.  So on that, I'm feeling a bit hypocritical, or at least somewhat conflicted.