The Learning Strategist

The language for technical courses should be fairly simple, straightforward and formal, as the content is most often action or task oriented. A few general guidelines to write for such content are: Don't use irrelevant jargon to decorate your conversation. Doing such things will not help engage the learner, but distract his focus from the objective. Instead use short but relevant scenarios and examples that help the learner relate to their job. Relevance is a great attention grabber. For example: As an administrator, you are required to assign permissions to various users based on their job roles. Look up the master list of users, and assign the users to their roles using the User Administration tab. Always start the instruction step of a procedure giving the location of the object on which an action needs to be performed. For example: In the Volume Control dialog box, select the Advanced button. Always give the result of the action at the end of the step soon after the instruct...

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 fea...