Curriculum Design

Like my classmates, I think interaction and engagement in training so vital, and often missed. Often the learner is not taken into enough consideration during curriculum design. 

Or if they are taken into consideration, it is often misunderstood or misaligned between what we think we know about our learners and what we actually know about our learners. 

One example I have is that I would often hear that our learners who visit our organization overwhelmingly hate interaction in their CBT courses. So inevitably, we didn’t design that into the courses. 

HOWEVER, I asked my team to dig deeper and find out why. What we found is that the learner didn’t like interaction because they found it confusing or a too easy. Now we are trying to find ways to integrate interaction into our courses that are more rigorous and at the same time simple to utilize, not simple in terms of their learning outcomes. 

Hopefully when we survey our learners next we can see that they appreciate what we’ve done to make their courses more rigorous and more interactive. This is what I think should be done more often for learners, find out why aspects of training aren’t resonating, and redesign them not just get rid of them. This is what I think of when I think about designing the curriculum with our learners in mind and a learner-centered approach.