Breaking down a course

A course is often seen as monolithic - a large thing where we expect students to spend 12 weeks and over a 150 hours of their time. How do we design that? Well we break it down.

The Course Development Process has been developed to specifically tackle a course and at each stage focus on a specific level of scale or a way of working that allows you to develop more fidelity and a closer 'zoom' over time.

Course Mapping

The Discover and Co-create stages are there to look at the course as a whole, get a whole of course perspective, see the student journey and begin to map out the main features of the course.

We use Miro for this stage because its infinite whiteboard allows us to visually 'map' out the course as a whole, to see it across a timeframe and begin to mark-out key features along the way. The use of colours to define the Activity types allows us to quickly see the students experience in the course very quickly. A good course experience should cover all types of learning, so therefore must includes all types of activities. From a zoomed out view of Miro we should see all of the colours that represent the activities the learner will carry out. If there are colours missing - then we can design those specific opportunities within the course.

Topics to Lessons

One of the important stages in the Co-create stage is to begin to move the course structure from topics to lessons. Topics are essentially containers for an idea - there's no clear measure as to what they are, where they start or when they stop. This is how so many courses get stuck delving back into the mists of time in order to explain something quite basic.

The use of a "lesson" in OPT is the development of an addressable question and provides more focus for both you the learning designer and your course author. A topic of "Market Research" doesn't tell you anything about what should or shouldn't be included in the course, where it would start or where it would end.

Turning this into a set of lessons would be as simple as framing the topic as a series of questions - What is Market Research? What does it look like? How is it done? When is it important?

One of the aims in OPT is to move away from a content driven model of design to focus on a learner experience by focussing on activities. Sure there is a requirement to have content in the course, but it doesn't need to be us that creates it all, or 'all again'! What's often not captured is a course is the teaching - the explanations, connections, analogies that help to build and reinforce a learners schema. This is often what is overlooked in a content focussed course - the what - but lessons allow us to move quickly onto, and spend more time on the why and how.

One other benefit of this approach is that the lessons structure the sequence around addressing a question. As learning designers we should be able answer the question to assess the “done” state of the lesson. When it's a topic we're often at the mercy of the course author to understand the done state of any topic. Has it been covered in the correct depth? Is there loads of extraneous information? It's incredibly hard to tell in a topic model of design.

Activities & Patterns

One of the practices we have been working to embed into our course development process is the use of the activities types. While these are useful for plotting out the overall learning experience, they become less useful as you get into the development of individual lessons and activities. What exactly can and does Content or Practice look like?

To counter this and aid the development of a sequence of learning we introduced the idea of Learning Patterns. Based on the concept of a Pattern Language, essentially Learning Patterns are a re-usable scaffold to aid the design of the learning experience. They provide a structure or way of thinking that can be reused and recombined to suit different contexts and topics. Patterns are like Lego. Simple shapes that fit together to make a unique experience for the student. These sequences can be customised to suit the purpose of the lesson.

Patterns are not templates, which have limited utility in learning design. No one has every asked “how can we make the experience of all of these courses exactly the same?” or “why don’t we teach biology and history in exactly the same way?”. Patterns on the other hand allow us to speed up the development process and provide more scaffolding for our course authors.

Explore the current range of Learning Patterns.

Learning Patterns have been incorporated to the new Smart Storyboard tool, so right from the outset you'll be able to utilise these in your course development process.