In the corporate training world, competency-based instruction and assessment is a dominant paradigm. Unfortunately, there is a distinct tendency for this kind of instructional design to drift towards content-centrism, rather than student-centrism. If you have a list of technical competencies that learners are supposed to master by the end of the course, it becomes easy just to teach those competencies as they are laid out in the source material. The hard work of thinking through the material from the student's perspective, what they want to learn when and why, never gets done. This produces less-effective learning materials.
Specifying learning objectives may not rectify this matter. It becomes easy just to re-dress competencies in learning-objective lingo. The instructional sequence can still be quite program-centric, and the rationale given to the learners for that sequence may still be framed in terms of the structure of the material, rather than according to their needs and desires to learn.
