In my last several blogs, I began describing how organizations can better support current business initiatives, increase organizational responsiveness, and reduce curriculum acquisition and development costs by aligning their business needs with their instructional assets. This final step of the process is “Proposing and Implementing Recommendations”. Following are the activities that are typically performed during this step.
Proposing Recommendations
For the most part, your recommendations will provide you and your management with the following choices:
• Obtain or create additional instructional materials to cover the performance objectives not covered by your current instructional assets
• Retire instructional assets
• Reuse instructional assets that are now identified and well documented.
Here is an outline for a report that consolidates these recommendations.
1. Introduction
2. Purpose of the report
3. Description of the effort and process used
4. Task listings
5. Audience and job analysis chart
6. Curriculum documentation chart
7. Curriculum alignment chart
8. Recommendations
• Curriculum reorganization
• Retirement of instructional assets
• Curriculum development
9. Action Plan and schedule
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.
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 Aligning Business Needs with Curriculum Assets.
I would enjoy hearing from you. Please contact me using the “Contact Us” tab on my website http://www.fttraining.com/
