7

Arranging a Technical Curriculum

What’s Inside This Chapter

This chapter presents strategies for organizing a technical curriculum and creating a design document that supports course objectives and the overall business goal, including a description of:

• the benefits and drawbacks of each style

• the building blocks of a course design document

• a complete topical outline.

A worksheet to guide your preparation of a course design document checklist concludes the chapter.

7

Arranging a Technical Curriculum

Options for Arranging a Technical Course

As we learned in previous chapters, taking a spaced approach to learning is important. The Priority Planner described in the last chapter can help you decide what content is most critical to be spaced, or emphasized, multiple times throughout the curriculum.

Additionally, look to see how logically information can be chunked to further help learners internalize information.

There will be trade-offs to consider, but when choosing an organizational system, try to optimize both chunking and spacing. The following sections describe various options for arranging technical training courses.

Organization by Order of Job Process

A course can be organized by the order in which tasks are completed in the target audience’s job. A course organized in this way may have three sections:

1. pre-job or task preparation

2. tasks done during the job

3. post-job procedures.

If there are specific products covered, those products would be covered in turn in each section of the course (Table 7–1). This type of organization is ideal for training courses tailored to a very specific target audience in which all members hold the same job title.

Benefits: This type of course organization allows for instruction that is very relevant to the exact job of the target audience. This also follows the spaced learning requirements, where topics are brought up multiple times throughout the course. If it makes sense to organize chunks according to procedures, then chunking could be enabled. However, depending upon the content, chunking could also be disrupted.

Drawbacks: Jumping around to different products during each section of the course (pre-job, job, and post-job) may be confusing to learners and could disrupt the chunking process. If you are not overtly clear about which tool you are covering, learners could confuse what characteristics go with each product. To counter these drawbacks, clear headings and written out or spoken transitions are key.

Organization by Product or Service

A course can also be organized based on the various products or services offered. The processes associated with each product or task (service) are covered completely in separate sections (Table 7-2). This type of organization is ideal for training courses that cover distinct and individual products or tasks.

Benefits: This organization shows one way you could incorporate spaced learning into a course. (Note that this is just one way it could be accomplished.) It also utilizes a degree of chunking, as each product or task is covered in its entirety.

This type of organization allows learners an opportunity to see how each product or service is specifically used in context. If a course is organized this way, there can be repetition of information covered about each product. Sometimes even very different products will have similar operational procedures. You can highlight where these products or tasks are similar or different from previously covered products and tasks. This could be done during explanation or during an activity, for example.

Drawbacks: Even though this has the opportunity to allow for spaced learning, by having to repeat so much information there is the chance that you will be including material that is not really that important. Your training may not be as efficient as it could be.

Organization by Case Study

This type of course is organized around a case scenario. In this type of organization, learners are given a case study to complete. The steps they must follow function as the order of the course. Sometimes this type of course organization can look very similar to the order of the job process course organization system.

This type of organization is ideal when you have a comprehensive case study available that matches the objectives of the course. The case study structure gives learners a big picture of the situation, the topic, and the class, and then allows them to go into detail from there. The case study organization works well for learners who desire to see the big picture before discussing details. It can also work well in courses in which participant discussion and extrapolation are required.

Benefits: The case study organizational style is usually quite engaging to the learners and relevant to their jobs, so organizing a course in this way can motivate them and help them directly relate training content to the workplace.

Drawbacks: This type of training can be quite time consuming to develop. Not every topic fits nicely into a case study format. Plus, it could be difficult to achieve a spaced effect.

Learner Choice

It may sound frightening, but another option is to allow learners to choose what topics are covered and in what order. This type of organization is ideal when you have motivated participants ready to take charge of their learning. It is good for learners who have reached the “conscious incompetence” stage of being—that is, for those who are aware of what they don’t know about a particular topic.

If it is not appropriate to let learners have control over all the topics covered in training, you may consider simply allowing them to determine the order in which topics are covered. If you have topics of parallel importance and levels of complication, letting learners choose the order in which those topics are covered will give them at least some tangible control over their learning (Figure 7-1).

Benefits: The benefit of this structure is that learners have control of their learning. This can motivate participants to be actively engaged.

Drawbacks: This structure may not work for learners who are still at the unconscious incompetence stage of learning, as they won’t even know what topics they should be asking for to improve their performance. In addition, with this type of structure, chunking principles are at risk. Your control over the organization of the course is lost. You may lose a logical flow—a related product or service that builds on another may not be covered right after the other. You may run the risk of starting off with a topic that is too difficult and having to explain the easier building blocks within that difficult topic, thus not really allowing learners to choose the order of the topics and just generally confusing everyone. In addition, you may also not accomplish spaced learning or scaffolding to the degree of detail you want.

Combination

Because not everything fits nicely into a category, you may find you need to use a combination of different organizational structures to fit your case. The combination organizational structure may be just the right fit for a number of tricky classes that don’t seem to fit perfectly into another category.

The combination organizational structure can look like many different things; the three described are simply examples (Table 7-3). For example, in Combination 1, each product is discussed separately according to that product’s distinct pre-job planning and job operations. Since all the products share basically the same post-job procedures in this case, the post-job procedures of all the products are discussed together. In Combination 2, all the products have similar pre-job procedures but have distinctly different job and post-job operations. Thus, the pre-job procedures are covered together and the job and post-job operations are covered separately per product. Finally, in Combination 3, all pre-job planning procedures are covered together. Then participants are allowed to choose the order of which of the three products they would like to cover.

Benefits: The combination course structure allows you the flexibility to fit an ideal organizational structure to your unique technical topic.

Example of Combination 2

Overview
Pre-job Product 1 Product 2 Product 3
Product 1 Job Post-job	Product 2 Job Post-job	Product 3 Job Post-job
Conclusion

Example of Combination 3

Drawbacks: Lack of chunking—If the organization gets too patchy or decentralized, your course structure is at risk of losing its organizational logic and can result in a completely disjointed flow. You need to keep this in mind if you start to mix together too many organizational structures. Additionally, you will have to take extra care to use scaffolding and spaced learning principles.

Once you have an idea of how you wish to arrange your curriculum, it is time to create a design document or storyboard. This will be your initial guide for the project.

The Building Blocks of a Design Document

Creating your design document is one of the most important tasks you will do for your technical course development project. The design document is where you determine specifics of what your learning solution will cover (Table 7-4). At a minimum, your design document should contain:

• a working title for the project

• business need

• the agreed-on audience

• any relevant results from analysis

• SMART learning objectives

• a topical outline or storyboard.

In your design document, you may also include plans for animations, graphics, models, or other items that have long lead times to produce, as well as a list of available resources, a list of prerequisite courses, learning items, and a description of accompanying job aids.

The Topical Outline

The largest section contained within your course design document is your topical outline. The topical outline is a detailed outline of each concept to be covered during the course. Every technical item on the outline needs to relate back to one of the SMART course objectives. You will probably find that the topical outline is the most challenging part of the design document to create.

As you create your design document, you need to be sure that the outline is complete and that it takes into account parallel and unparallel concepts. These items will be discussed below.

Completeness of Outline

You should be aware of whether particular sections in your outline are complete or incomplete. You can determine whether a section is complete by referring to the course objectives. All the objectives should be met through the course topics represented. If the course objectives are not met by the items listed, you have an incomplete section.

Consider the objectives from the previous outline (Table 7-5).

This time, however, imagine that as you put together the topical outline, you find that your coverage of topics is skewed. In this instance, the topic is heavy on data for “Navigating the software” and quite sparse for “Creating an analysis” and “Contingencies.” This outline demonstrates the way in which technical developers many times receive material. It is up to you to recognize when an outline is skewed and does not contain complete information (Table 7-6).

Parallel and Unparallel Concepts Taken Into Account

You should also be aware of the level of detail of particular topics on your outline. For example, let’s say your technical course was about baking a cake and you had the topic list as shown (Table 7-7). The items in this outline are not all parallel concepts. “Measure correct amount of baking soda” is more detailed than the rest of the items in the outline. As such, you would want the outline to reflect this and would move “Measure correct amount of baking soda” to a subtopic in the appropriate place in the outline (Table 7-8).

This may seem trivial, but as you move to more complicated topics it becomes even more important. Consider the next example. If you are a nontechnical developer, you will not always understand the intricacies of your technical topic. But there are ways you can learn to think about technical subjects to create an appropriate and complete topical outline.

As you build a topical outline for a technical training class, you should be on the lookout for these types of information:

• categories

• levels of information

• definitions

• components

• relationships

• analogies

• processes.

Keeping in mind what type of information you are gathering as you compile it will be important when you start to put together your outline and your course.

As you talk about technical information with your SMEs, you should keep a finger on the category under which the information you are speaking about might fall, the level of information you are discussing (for example, whether it is a broad, abstract principle or a very small detail), whether the information is a definition or a component of a bigger piece, or whether two or more items are related (Table 7-9).

Keep track of statements like this one: “The center component of Product A is pretty distinct compared to what was previously available with Product B.” You may not understand just what the difference is between Product A and Product B, but you should be able to tell—based on how the two terms are discussed—that they should be in different categories. Sometimes you are not just listening for an understanding of the concept; you are also listening for key words that will clue you in to where this information is supposed to be organized. Keeping in mind the type of information you are talking about, as you are talking about it, can help you as you create your topical outline.

Getting It Done

After you have gathered all the necessary information (audience, business purpose, and objectives) for your technical learning development project, the next step is compiling, analyzing, and arranging this information. This chapter discussed creating a design document that fully supports the course objectives and the overall business goal. It is important to identify all the topics necessary for a course and to determine the order in which those topics should be arranged (Worksheet 7-1).

There are many ways in which a course can be organized, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. You will need to look at your specific topic and course objectives in to determine which structure is ideal.

Worksheet 7-1. Course Design Document Checklist

Use this checklist to ensure that you have a complete and accurate course design document.