Skip to main content

Analyzing technical information simplified

You can start planning the design of your course once you have the requisite information. You can decide what is 'sufficient' based on some of the following points:

1. You have information about your audience profiles.
2. You have the business problem that needs to be solved.
3. You have the product available for research.

Once you have answers to the above, you can start making your course/curriculum plan. Though you might have heard these terms before, I will attempt to define them from a perspective that is more generic.

Curriculum: A curriculum is a set of courses that are logically put together in order to provide a complete training solution for a single product. For example, you may have a single curriculum for an entire product, like a curriculum for learning how to use Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Course: A high-level tangible task that a learner needs to accomplish in order to use a single or multiple features a product. Again this would depend on the complexity of the feature/s. So we can divide our curriculum to contain both basic and advanced courses.

For example, our Adobe Photoshop CS4 curriculum may contain the following courses:

1. Adobe Photoshop Basics
2. Using Adobe Photoshop to Edit Bitmap Graphics
3. Adobe Photoshop Advanced Concepts
4. Creating Special Effects Using Adobe Photoshop
5. Automating Tasks Using Adobe Photoshop

What have we done so far?

- Identified the curriculum and what it aims at achieving
- Based on the goal of the curriculum, we came up with a list of courses which are essentially task based

Now let’s get on with the rest of the task. Our goal is to create a curriculum and define the courses that would enable certain audience profiles to perform their activities effectively using the tool Adobe Photoshop. Here are the next steps.

Identify your audience
In order to design your curriculum, you need to know the roles your audience play. For example, let’s consider the following different users of Adobe Photoshop:

1. Visual/Graphic Designer
2. Photographer
3. Usability engineer/GUI specialist

Design your objectives
The next step is to define your course objectives. You can start with defining your terminal objective which you will further break down to the level of enabling objectives. The terminal objective is the high level objective that your course aims at achieving. When you analyze your terminal objective your break it down to the constituent tasks that enable the achievement of these objectives. These are your enabling objectives.

Thus task analysis is a top down model that enables you to drill down from a course level to the level of identifying the lessons or modules or even the topics, that will constitute your course. It is a drill-down cycle, where you can continue this process till you have the most simplified unit, which could be a single task that the learner can learn to execute in one go.

So let’s take a single course out of our list above and analyze the objectives.

Course Name: Adobe Photoshop Basics
Terminal Objective: To familiarize the student with the basic concepts and tools available in Adobe Photoshop.
Enabling Objectives:
By the end of this course, the student should be:
1. Familiar with the basic concepts of Adobe Photoshop
2. Familiar with the menus and tools provided by Adobe Photoshop
3. Able to use the user interface of Adobe Photoshop effectively

Now the following enabling objectives each could be converted to a lesson:

1. Basic Concepts of Adobe Photoshop
2. Tools and Menus of Adobe Photoshop
3. Using the Adobe Photoshop User Interface

You can use this method and continue to drill down based on the need. Now we’re almost done.

Delivering your course
Following this, you can plan your course delivery method. Decide what will suit your audience better. Whether they would prefer to have online courses or instructor-led or blended. Typically it makes sense to deliver simpler and more conceptual courses online, but keep the advanced task oriented ones for an instructor-led course. This does not mean that you cannot make effective complex online courses, as you can come up with various strategies to make the courses engaging as well as effective. Scenarios and use cases are most effective for technical product training.

Here are some sample curriculum and course design templates.

Dr. Tony Karrer's blog post on Course and Courseware Fading - The Future of learning gives a more futuristic point of view to this model of traditional courseware.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Of Android, Mobile Games and Learning Experiences

I never thought I'll write about learning games and mobile learning until I bought my Android. People have asked me, why Android phone? My answer has been that I love Android as it is breaking new ground for mobile computing and open technologies. Android is versatile as it is not limited only to mobile phones, but it can be installed on various devices. Android gives developers the opportunity to leverage their development skills, while also building an exciting and active community, just as ground breaking as Java. Just thought of adding this: "When technologies don't restrain you, they enable you to innovate." I truly believe open technologies are the future! I couldn't have written this post without experiencing the real thing. I had set aside to buy my Android (Nexus S) after some expenses were out of the way. But my 5 year old Nokia gave in and I had no other choice but to buy my Nexus immediately. I am extremely happy. Having the power of a smartphone ,

Future of Organizational Learning: Some questions

Recently, someone from Bloomfire contacted me over LinkedIn and requested me to give answers to some questions. I have been late to respond but thought they were pertinent given the way things have changed in the training world. So let me answer them for myself anyway before I send them to Bloomfire. From your perspective, what are some of the challenges in writing curricula that resonate with the learner? The main challenge I see is Knowing your audience precisely. Knowing your audience helps you scope out the training accurately and achieve the right level of detail. It will be the key to any kind of task you want to do; build a product, create a game, or plan training content. How might these challenges differ from the challenges of yesterday? I believe the challenges of yesterday were more than the challenges of today. The intervention of Web 2.0 and the increasing tech-savvyness of the learner have made information immediately accessible to one and all. Today, most informatio

The New Age Instructional Designer

Instructional design provides a gamut of principles and models that enable you to train people effectively in various areas of expertise. The role of an instructional designer is essentially driven by a need to find appropriate solutions by applying instructional design strategies and models to transfer information to users who use a particular product or service to perform their jobs. Changed Learning Methods As time progressed and technologies evolved, the role of the instructional designer as we understood it several years back, underwent a paradigm shift. In spite of client demands to create conventional elearning courses, the fact is that the way people are learning today has changed phenomenally due to the increased access to social media tools and advanced mobile devices. Twitter, blogs, wikis, and discussions have become the new age learning methods. Learner's look for relevance and access information only when it is needed. The concept of reading everything that co