Faster, Better, Cheaper and More Effective Course Design

Tying learning into real organizational results

I always love to hear course design guru Thiagi speak (www.thiaigi.com). He consistently gets away with saying things that no other keynote in the world can. At the International Alliance of Learning (www.ialearn.org), I had the privilege once again in hearing his ‘pearls of wisdom’. Strangely enough, it was not just what he said that intrigued but the hand-out. He put together a list of principles and procedures that in my opinion provide a very good basis for course design and that we have applied in our courses (www.oyginc.com). Here are his 12 principles for faster, better, cheaper course design:

1. Let the inmates run the asylum. Invite participants to generate learning content and conduct the training activities. This works closely with Dave Meier’s dictum on accelerated learning that if you are tired after a training event, you have worked too hard and the learners have not worked hard enough.

2. Content is abundant. Incorporate existing content in your training.

3. It’s the activity, stupid. Don’t waste your time in designing content. Invest it in designing training activities.

4. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use templates for presenting content, designing activities, and structuring learning events.

5. It isn’t over – ever. Use feedback from every training session to continuously improve the training package.

6. Show me the cash. Use external results as the only way to evaluate training.

7. Face reality. Use authentic assessment for your final test, authentic activities for practice exercises, and authentic examples for illustrating content.

8. Open minds with open questions. Require and reward higher-order thinking.

9. Walk in all directions. Design your training concurrently and iteratively.

10. Avoid analysis paralysis. Don’t spend more than 5 minutes for the initial analysis.

11. Build the airplane while flying it. Design training while delivering it.

12. Think outside the box. Use creative approaches to your training and creative responses from your participants.

Here are Thiagi’s list of procedures for creating learning courses.

1. Specify logistics. Figure out the local resources, constraints, and administrative details.

2. Conduct initial analysis. Do a 5-minute analysis to specify metrics for the results.

3. Construct tests. Construct authentic final tests and subtests. Arrange the subtests in a sequence.

4. Accumulate materials. Collect existing content, activity templates, and testing formats.

5. Design rapidly. Work with SMEs and participants to design different modules in a slapdash fashion.

6. Align everything. Mare sure that the activities, content and tests are congruent with each other. Periodically check the linkages among the modules.

7. Repeat. Repeat the previous steps as many times as needed.

8. Deliver. Deliver, evaluate, revise and repeat.

9. Keep tweaking. Keep improving the training package (until you die).

An important aspect in all this is the culture. You need to have a culture that supports the learning (see my article Building a Culture of Learning (http://www.flexiblethinker.com/articles/learning2.php). I know that we, like other quality course designers, have applied these principles and procedures intuitively and Thiagi has once again said them simply and brilliantly. As any good educator or course designer will tell you, it is more important to focus on the design of activities because you can use content that already exist. After all the success of learning is not just about memorizing information, it is applying it.