Getting Your Content Together and In Order

Getting Your Content Together

Once you've thought about the high level aims of your program and defined some rock solid learning objectives, you'll be in a position to start putting some content flesh on the bones of your objectives.

There are two elements to consider when selecting content:

• What to include
• How much detail you need

What to include

Aim to provide enough for the learner to be self-sufficient without overwhelming them with irrelevant content.

Question: What do we mean by 'irrelevant'?

Answer: Anything that does not support the achievement of your curriculum’s learning objectives.

How much detail do you need?

You need to anticipate what a learner needs. To do this:

1. Collect together the content you think you will need to include in your curriculum
2. Using your learning objectives as a starting point, apply the 'relevance test' to each piece of content

The relevance test - ask yourself:

• Am I providing enough detail? Or too much?
• In other words, is it Essential, Important or Nice-to-have? (E, I or N)

Ready to start?

Use the program you’ve chosen to work on.

1. Select one of the learning objectives you’ve written
2. Choose content that you believe will be helpful in achieving this learning objective
3. Using the relevance test questions, categorize your content into three piles, E, I or N

You don't need to put anything into On.Board quite just yet. That will come slightly later. For the moment, just collect together all the information you think you will need in whatever format is most natural or convenient for you.

When you have selected your content and are happy about the volume in the three different piles, you are ready to move to the next stage - choosing the order in which to show your content.

Ordering Your Content

Help your learners to develop their knowledge and understanding by considering the best or most logical order in which to position activities in the curriculum sections.

Choose your logical sequence by focusing on the steps that make most sense for the subject.

For example, learning a new ...

• ... process might mean beginning with the starting point of the process and working through to the very end
• ... skill might involve introducing the basics, then introducing complexity progressively

Remember what we said earlier about the importance of structure? We recommend that your program's curriculum has an Introduction, the Learning Content and a Test (or Application). Stick to these and you can't go too far wrong.

The next step is to think about your three piles (E - Essential, I - Important and N - Nice-to-have) and how you would order your learning content:

1. Start with the E pile and rearrange the items into the best or most logical order
2. If you were to include some I's, where would you insert them? Ask yourself whether the I's add genuine learning value or just get in the way
3. Now look at the N's. You may recall what we said in the last activity about only including the content that is necessary to help the learner meet their learning objectives. Therefore, you might want to leave these out of your curriculum and save them for future learning instead

So, now we've covered formulating the aims of your program and its learning objectives, selecting learning content according to objective-relevance and getting it in a logical order.

Once the plan is in place, you will be in a good position to get hands-on and start building your program in On.Board.