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Planning Prior to the Course (Domain 1)

3. Learning Objective Development Process

After you've identified the course's organisational and learner needs and clearly defined the class's high level instructional goal or purpose, the next step is to narrow it down to specific learning objectives. Objectives. And the learning objectives are knowledge, skills, and abilities that the learner is expected to acquire by the end of the course. And there's a development process for how to come up with these learning objectives, and it's in three steps that we're going to talk about them. Now, step number one, you take that high-level instructional goal, which we talked about in the previous lesson, and then from that overarching goal, you create a topical outline that divides the instruction goal into units or domains of understanding. And then from those topical units, youth create specific learning objectives, which are the actual tactical skills, technical skills, and abilities that the learner will leave with. And these are important to be able to clearly define not only for the students, but also when communicating with the organisation that's hosting the training or the technical trainers that will be teaching a course that you develop. It's very important to make all of this clear because it guides a well-organized course. So here we are with the instructional goal that we had from our previous lecture, the client relations management software training. We had that high-level overview as well as just three main topics of understanding that would be accomplished, namely creating email templates, organizing sales pipelines, and integrating social media. So the next thing to do would be to create a topical outline based on that high-level instructional goal. So here's the instructional goal again—and now it's been broken down. So there's three high level taskshave now been created into units. Unit one is about creating emails, Unit two is about organising sales pipelines, and Unit three is about integrating social media. And then there are subunits in each one of those topical units that kind of break it down even further. So when it comes to creating email templates,for example, synchronising with the CRM, creating atemplate design, inserting text into the template, thisis breaking down the topics even further. And then the final step is to define the learning objectives, which are specific learning outcomes that are based on each topical unit that you created in the earlier step. So this is just breaking down one unit—just unit one about creating email templates. And you'll notice that the subtasks that we developed previously, namely synchronising email, choosing template design, and inserting template text, have now been divided down even further to the specific technical tasks that the learner will learn how to do. They'll learn how to locate the email template tab in the software, and they'll learn how to input their email account credentials as they're syncing the email with the CRM. They'll also learn how to grant the CRM access to email context. So this is at the granular level for each individual task. But now everyone who is training the course or hosting the course knows exactly what the students will learn and what they will be able to do at the end of the technical training.

4. Assessing Current Skill Level

As you're developing your course, you do need to take into consideration what your learners already know. You'll need to assess their current skill levels so that you can design the course accordingly. For example, you may find that the students are well versed in the topic and it doesn't need to be included in the training at all. Or maybe you just do a brief review. On the other hand, if you identify particular weaknesses, then you may choose to allocate more time in the class for practising the technical skill or for opening yourself up to questions and answers, or something like that. So assess first what your learner already knows. Don't make assumptions as to what they already know. It could be that if you assume that your student doesn't know anything, you end up creating a course that is overly simplistic, and then it seems like a waste of time for the learner. On the other hand, if you make your course too complicated and assume that your learner already knows a lot, it can be very frustrating and difficult for the student. So there's a sweet spot for designing a course that will truly meet the needs. So how do you determine what your students already know? You could create some sort of written form of assessment where they self-reflect and write down what they'd like to learn and their strengths and weaknesses. Or it could just be conversations that you have, as we mentioned before, with stakeholders, managers, and team members, to get a sense of what really needs to be targeted in the course. and you may determine that some hard and fast course prerequisites are required. So this is the case, particularly in academies of technology. I worked with one academy, and we offered some higher level cybersecurity certification training programs, but we didn't really like to put students in who didn't have a basic understanding of technology, hardware, software, or basic networking. As a result, we would sometimes recommend, and even require, that a student have passed CompTIA A Plus before enrolling in the CompTIA Security Plus course. So that might be the case in your training organisation or with an internal training course. You may require that there be some baseline knowledge and experience that each learner has before they're invited to the course. Let's take a look at some ways to do precourse assessments. Some considerations here First of all, we all know what it's like to be in a corporate atmosphere. It can be very competitive. People don't often like to admit the things that they don't know because they think that it will put them at a competitive disadvantage. This isn't very conducive to education, but we've got to work with what we've got. So create an atmosphere of ease and trust, follow organisational protocol, and be respectful and confidential. So obviously, if employees open up about things that they don't know about that they could use brushing up on Be respectful of the competitive environment that they're part of. A formal test is another method for determining skill level. So this is a multiple-choice or perhaps an open-ended test in which you ask questions to determine what students know and don't know. And the goal is not to trick anyone or to create the questions. It's too hard, but to assess learning So as you're developing the questions, you want to keep that in mind as the purpose of the pre-course exam.

5. The ADDIE Model of Instructional Design

The Addie Methodology for Instructional Design is a commonly used life cycle process for how to go about building a curriculum for a technical program. Addy by name is not called out in the ETT Plus exam, but a lot of the principles and fundamental concepts that are covered in the "Adding" methodology do appear on the test. So it will be important that you understand those, and really, it does help you to create a good curriculum. So, as a technical trainer, you want to be familiar with the five steps of the Addie model. Addie is an acronym for the five-step analysis: design, development, implementation, and evaluation. So let's talk about these steps one by one and how they contribute to designing an effective technical training course. The first step in the Addie model is the analysis step. We've talked about some of this already—assessing organisational needs, assessing learner needs, and assessing the current skill level of your learners. But it's also good to ask yourself if this course is successful: What does success look like at the end of it? What's going to make us feel like it really accomplished its goals? And then how will that be measured too, by the organisation or the individual receiving the training? That's part of the analysis phase. Also, there will be an analysis of the actual technical skills and tasks. What is the change of behaviour that we're looking to accomplish in the learner? What technologies will they be using? How will it impact their day-to-day life? And how will workflow be improved by the technical skills that you're teaching? And then there's a performance evaluation? So this has again to do with the needs of the organization, but how will the improved learners' abilities affect the organization? How will it optimise their process? Again, what will this mean for a return on investment for the training—excuse me, for the organisation that the workers will be part of in the design phase? When you're actually designing the course content, there are some considerations to keep in mind. First of all, is it cost effective?So what is your budget for creating the course? This will help you know what kind of technologies you can use and what kind of materials you have at your disposal. When it comes to cost considerations too, if you are training employees that are being pulled away from their nine-to-five jobs, you have to really be clear to the organisation as to what the cost will be in terms of man hours and how that will impact workflow within the organization. So that's to be considered when you're designing your course. Of course you want your training to be effective, specifically based on the learning objectives that we talked about developing. And again, we want it to be practical for the day-to-day work of the learners. And when it comes to making a course effective, you also need to understand the qualifications that you will require for a trainer. So what level of expertise is required on the trainer's part? So when you're sourcing a trainer for your course, what do they need to know, and what kind of experience do they need to have? That's part of the design process too. And then how will you make your course engaging? So focusing on learner benefits, learner-focused education, captivating your audience with interesting and exciting activities, and things like that So this will be considered in the design phase. And once you've designed it, now you have to develop it. So a lot of times, when it comes to product development, you will first create a prototype. So this is kind of like a brief demonstration of the course style. You will discuss what kind of activities, give somesamples, also a summary of the course and aplan of how it will be implemented. This is usually communicated to the organisational leadership so that they are aware of how the course will look when it is fully developed. Then you'll have to actually develop the content itself. So this is media creation; this is creating a slideshow; this is creating video content. This means making sure that the materials and the instructional information follow logical thought, process, and development. This is making sure that handouts and job aids are aesthetically pleasing, that the graphics are appropriate, and that they look professional. This is all part of the development phase. And again, with testing, you'll have to do some quality assurance. You may have desktop publishers or graphic artists that will contribute to this work. For other media creators, you may be responsible for making sure that it meets the standards of quality that the organisation has. You also might want to practise some of the activities that you plan on using, test them out, and get a group of support staff to practise what the activity looks like. The group learning exercise: is it feasible? Are you going to be able to roll it out to four groups of people simultaneously in one class? So you might want to test that out. And then also technologies too. So if you're using some sort of projection or if you're using some sort of interactive game, do you have it all synced up? Does it work? So in one training organisation that I worked at, we used Cahoot. And Cahoot is like a game show. Everybody downloads it on their phone, and you punch in as you would on a game show to give your answer, and you compete to see who can do it quickest. But again, you've got to make sure that you know how to instruct people to download the app and how to project the questions on the overhead projector. So testing things out is really beneficial, so you don't run into problems on the first day of class. Step four is the actual implementation of your design. So the logistics of running the class enrollment, which may include accepting payment from learners, classroom management, and also setting up the technology in the classroom, setting up computer labs, making sure that the hardware is plugged in and functioning, that software is loaded, that all the devices are imaged correctly, etc., etc. Part of implementation And then we have the delivery itself. So communicating with the learners, communicating with the organization, making sure everybody is aware of the assumptions for the learners and when they're going to start, when they're going to finish, how long it's going to take, what they're going to learn There is some scheduling involved with the training organisation and also with the learners. And then in the delivery, there is also the actual facilitation of the course as a trainer. And then also, considerations for trainers are going to include recruiting qualified trainers that meet the requirements that you specified in the design phase. If they need some preparatory education to make sure that the trainers can deliver correctly, perhaps new or proprietary technologies, you'll need to make sure that they're up to speed on that. And then, of course, you're going to have to book them right.If they're contracted technical trainers,this can be the case. Sometimes you'll have to make sure that your class runs at a time when they can give it or teach it. Step five, finally, is the evaluation stage. So this is how you are going to assess what new knowledge the learners have acquired. How are you going to assess their new competency? And this can be done through the end-of-course exams. As well as performance metric analysis. that's done after the course, also evaluating the instructor's performance. So hearing back from the learners—and we'll talk about specific ways you can do this in a future lecture—but just like a kind of internal audit of the process, how did it go? How was our trainer? How are our materials? How is the course designed? How do we think it all went down? What was the quality? And then finally, you'll evaluate the course design. So was it logical? Did it meet the goals? Was it effective? And was it to the standards of quality that we expect for our organization? So there you have it. Those are the five steps of the Addy model. It's good to review these, and I hope that you use this resource if you're ever in a position where you're developing curriculum so that you don't start a class blind or with a weak design. But you can go through the five steps and test things out. And then, when you implement it, when you deliver it, you feel confident about doing it, and when you're finished, you can evaluate it. You can look back and reflect on what you've done, and you can improve it for next time. And this is an excellent way to continue improving your abilities as a trainer and a curriculum developer.

6. Kirkpatrick's Four Levels Evaluation Model

Donald Kirkpatrick was a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and he is famed for his Four Levels Evaluation Model, which is an objective way to evaluate the success of a training event. There is Mr Kirkpatrick. So anyhow, what are these four levels, and how do we apply them? Well, the first level is reaction. So what was the reaction of the learner? You might get this by way of a feedback survey. A lot of organisations will ask the students what they thought about the training, and you can get some good responses from that on the part of the learner as to whether or not they felt that they learned anything. What was the course like? What was the trainer like? You want to find out whether the learner really felt that the course was practical for them, engaging for them, interesting, and that they left knowing something that they didn't know before. The second level is the learning level, and this has to do with actual knowledge acquisition. And you get this information from the final exam. Sometimes you can compare a post-course exam with a pre-course exam, and you can actually have some metrics on how much improvement there was on behalf of an individual learner. So that's one form of evaluating a training event. And then there is the behaviour level. So what was the actual change in the participant's behavior? What are they able to do now that they weren't able to do before the training, and what evidence is there that they can do it? So sometimes there are practical exams or actual performance-based exams when you roll out a technical programme where they actually have to do a technical task to pass the class. And that will give you feedbackon the behaviour level of evaluation. and finally, results. What are the organisational outcomes? Key performance indicators that demonstrate that students now know something they didn't know before They're working quicker, and they're working more effectively. This is improving the organisational process. This is making more money for the organization. This is improving their compliance, whatever it was that their goal was. What are the results and how do we document them? So by incorporating these four levels of evaluation,you can really be thorough post course tofigure out how well we did lessons learned. Where can we improve, what was the success, and how can we make it even more successful next time?

7. Maintaining Flexibility & Customizability

So imagine, if you will, that you've just spenta number of months developing a wonderful course. You went through the process of assessing organisational needs and learner needs, speaking with shareholders, and going through the added design process. You're about to deliver the course, and then everything changes. Organizational leadership asks you to make some significant adjustments to your course. How will you respond? It could be tempting to be frustrated, but the purpose of this lecture is to remind you to maintain your flexibility and customizability. So there are always organisational perspectives that you may not be aware of that need to be addressed at the last minute. So it's important to not be so rigid in your course design or implementation that you can't respond when necessary. One way to facilitate this is to leave a little breathing room in your course design. So don't cram so much information in there that there's no room for adjusting to things that come up that are unexpected. and then also remember to be customizable. Maybe you bring a course with you, no matter what, where you teach something that you've personally developed, but remember that there could be some custom features that are unique to the situation or the industry that you're working with. So, as you design your course, include some customizability to ensure flexibility. Remember that you're building a business relationship with the training organization. Your reputation is important. After you're done teaching a course, you want to be invited back to teach that course again, or invited to develop a curriculum for another course and teach that. In cooperating with the training organization, being quick to be flexible and apply updates and implement customization really is going to set you apart as a very professional and experienced technical trainer.

8. Anticipating Challenges

Briefly, I wanted to talk a little bit about anticipating challenges in course design and course materials. If you're working for a larger training organization, it's very possible that you are not the one who has developed the training curriculum materials or schedule or anything like that. You may not have had any input into the design. And there is a principle that you need to remember for the test, which is that of working cooperatively with an organization, a larger organization. So this isn't the time to call out errors in the materials in front of a class that really undermines the respect of the organisation as a whole. Or if there is a design element that you don't like or a module that you don't like, it's not your responsibility as the trainer to alter that curriculum without the approval of the training organization. Your responsibility is to deliver that information according to the design. Because remember, there could be some design factors, organisational needs, or learner needs that you are not privy to. You may not have that full perspective. So it's important that you follow the design as it is presented to you, and you're going to get a number of questions about this on the exam. So basically, don't belittle the training organization, don't belittle the training materials, and don't call attention to flaws in front of the class. If there is something that you really feel could be improved in the class, or just something like an error in the material, a typographical error, or a content error, then take that as a sidebar with the organization. Maybe report back to the curriculum developers to let them know that there is an edit that needs to be made and suggest it respectfully. And if a student brings this up, then defend the training organization. Just be respectful; acknowledge the fact that they brought it up. Thank you for noticing that, and I'll make sure that it gets passed on to the appropriate parties. But maintain a professional atmosphere, and that way you'll really handle challenges as they come in a way that is dignified.

9. Training Session Logistics

It's tempting to imagine yourself as a technical trainer who can simply show up on day one and deliver an excellent course with no problems. But there are some logistical things that, as technical trainers, we really need to give attention to to make sure that the class runs smoothly and that we're prepared on day one. For example, what's the schedule of the course going to be? When will it begin? When will it end? When will you take breaks? How many breaks will there be? When will you have lunch? How are the students going to get lunch? If you're in a physical location, can you give them some direction on where they can purchase lunch or how they can store lunches that they may have brought? All of this is just a list of logistical issues that you must be able to communicate, either in writing or verbally, on the first day. There are also time zone considerations. If you're doing virtual teaching, you want to be specific about what time zone you're in and recognise that if students are in different time zones, that could affect when you choose to take breaks and lunch breaks and things like that. For a physical classroom, there's also the logistical issue of reserving a classroom. Will it be available for the number of weeks or days that you plan on doing the course? So training can fit inconveniently in conference rooms, but for larger technical training, you might need a class to be set up or a room to be set up for a full six weeks. So where is this going to happen? Is the organisation okay with you taking that space? Is it going to be undisturbed by others in an organisation with a lot going on? These are considerations that you need to plan out ahead of time. If training labs are outside of the classroom, have you reserved time in those labs? If there are learning aids or materials, textbooks, or workbooks that the students need to have before day one, Have you delivered them ahead of time? Have they been sent out, or have they been emailed with PDFs? That's a consideration too, with logistics, and as we talked about meal arrangements and other outdoor activities, if something needs to be taken outside of the classroom, have you planned all the intricacies of getting the students in and out of the classroom? Make sure you give some consideration to all of these organisational things before you start teaching the class.

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