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.
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.
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