Thiagi’s List of Procedures for Creating Learning Courses.
This list is from Course Design Guru Thiagi. He listed out his principles and procedures for planning and creating a faster, better, and cheaper course. Click on this link for his 12 principles, and below are his procedures in order to create a course that is able to maximize value and effectiveness.
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. 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.