Notes

Implementing Recommendations

Most of your recommendations will probably surround the following choices.Retire

Courses and Materials

This is self-explanatory. While you may wish to do this immediately, it would probably be best to consider your organization’s process for retiring these assets.

Obtain Additional Third Party Materials

Obtaining third-party materials may be your most cost-effective choice for filling the holes left by your existing curricula. This calls for an additional analysis in which you analyze the third-party course and compare its objectives to the performance objectives that are not being met by your current instructional assets.

Develop Materials

Many times, you will find that the objectives not covered by the third-party course are specific to your organization and can only be met by materials that you create internally.

Developing the following types of instructional tools can greatly streamline your efforts.

Course Road Maps: Course Road Maps direct participants to the instructional assets that they need to complete. They can even route participants based on their prerequisites or performance on a mastery test.

Activity Sheets: Sometimes it is difficult for participants to put together the big picture of what they are required to do and when they are required to do it. Activity sheets are one way of providing them with this information.

Resource Maps: Sometimes the hardest part of performing an activity is finding out where to look for guidance. Internal documents, corporate intranets, and the Internet itself contain a wealth of information if you know where to look. Often this is not as intuitive as it may seem, especially for someone who does not know what he or she is looking for. Resource maps are similar to curriculum road maps, except that they route participants to resources other than courseware.

Job Aids: Road maps, activity sheets, and resource maps are only a few examples of job aids. Use your creativity to develop new ones. Be sure to consider procedure sheets, flowcharts, worksheets, samples, and cheat sheets.

Assessments: A major part of most quality initiatives is assessment and evaluation. For every course or curriculum that you have analyzed, you should develop a pre-requisite and mastery test. Assess and Revise

A curriculum architect’s work is never done. Implement your newly aligned curricula, begin reusing learning objects, continue to assess their effectiveness, and make refinements.

Conclusion

The process described in this series of blogs represents years of refinement of the “Aligning Business Needs with Curriculum Assets” model derived from work on front-end analysis, performance problem-solving analysis, task analysis, and instructional design. This is an organic process that merits ongoing refinements by content development practitioners. Temper it with your own intelligence, and enhance it with your own expertise to make it work for your organization.