In my last two blogs, I began describing how organizations can better support current business initiatives, increase organizational responsiveness, and reduce curriculum acquisition and development costs by alining their business needs with their instructional assets. The second step of this six step process is Analyzing your Curricula. Following are the activities that are typically performed during this step.
1. Gather Instructional Materials and Related Information
Determine your curriculum materials and any information you have that support your instructional assets (e.g., instructor guides, assessments, course descriptions).
2. Identify Additional Information Needs
In the best of all possible worlds, your curriculum materials will have nicely grouped instructional objectives, as well as detailed information on the target audience. You will rarely have all the information you need. So allow time to determine the additional information that you need to gather related to the audience, tasks, and performance and enabling objectives.
3. Analyze and Document the Curricula
In this step, you go beyond the information that the instructional assets provide and determine what your courses and curricula are really made of. You will not need to perform all the activities identified below, only the ones that resulted from your analysis of the performance objectives. In addition, you may need to perform some additional activities; for example, task analyses if they have never been done before.
Generate Instructional and Enabling Objectives. This includes performance objectives, instructional objectives, and enabling objectives.
The difference between performance objectives and instructional objectives is that performance objectives specify the behaviors that you want participants to perform back on the job. Since the instructional environment does not have the resources of the work environment (e.g., people and machinery), instructional objectives are simulated counterparts of those real-world objectives that are possible in an instructional environment.
An enabling objective is a subset of an instructional objective. Mastery of several enabling objectives enables participants to perform an instructional objective. You can generate enabling objectives by converting assessment items or the course outline and associated activities into objectives. I believe that it is easier to infer the real-world performance desired from an assessment item than from a title in a content outline.
Validate and Enhance Objectives. Do not believe everything that you read. Simply because the authors of the internal or third-party courses that compose curricula say that the materials accomplish a performance objectives does not make it so. You need to make that judgment for yourself.
Check the course descriptions of the performance objectives against the activities, exercises, and assessment items in the course. In this way, you can ensure that participants will be exhibiting the performances specified in the objectives during instruction. Also, be sure to check that the published performance objectives match the task listing.
Convert Assessment Items Into Objectives. If your assessments are representative and valid, converting assessment items into objectives is straightforward. Build the objective by identifying the five elements of an effective objective (who, behavior, results, conditions, standards). Then write a sentence or two that covers these components.
Convert Course Outlines and Activities Into Objectives. This method typically requires more effort. You need to follow the same steps as converting from an assessment item to an objective, but this time using the content outline and associated activities as a reference. Then, write a sentence or two that covers the five elements listed above.
Group Objectives Under Corresponding Performance Objectives.
You will usually group instructional objectives using the same method as grouping performance objectives. You can assemble objectives in several ways; product or product class, sequence the work is performed, logical order of the subject matter, or from facts to concepts, rules, and finally to principles. Whatever the case, it is easiest to compare objectives if you group them the same way.
4. Document the Results of this Step
Document the results of this stage of the process. You can use the “Curriculum Documentation Chart” by clicking
this link .
Hold your horses, at this point we have described the first two steps of the process, “Documenting your Business Needs” and “Analyzing your Curricula”, In the next step we will dig the the gold “Aligning your Business Needs with your Curriculum Assets.”
For those of you that are interested, here is a link to examples, job aids, and a more detailed
description of the total process for Recycling Learning Objects.
I would enjoy hearing from you. Please contact me using the “Contact Us” tab on my website http://www.fttraining.com/
