e-Learning by Design

1

Designing e-learning

Planning the development of online learning

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have come together to learn and share knowledge. Until now, we have had to come together at the same time and place. But today, the technologies of the Internet have eliminated that requirement. Soon anybody will be able to learn anything anywhere at any time, thanks to a new development called e-learning.

WHAT IS E-LEARNING?

E-learning marshals computer and network technologies to the task of education. Several definitions of e-learning are common. Some people hold that e-learning is limited to what takes place entirely within a Web browser without the need for other software or learning resources. Such a pure definition, though, leaves out many of the truly effective uses of related technologies for learning.

Definition of e-learning

There are a lot of complex definitions of e-learning, so I’ll offer you a simple one:

E-learning is the use of information and computer technologies to create learning experiences.

This definition is deliberately open-ended, allowing complete freedom as to how these experiences are formulated, organized, and created. Notice that this definition does not mention courses, for courses are just one way to package e-learning experiences. It also does not mention any particular authoring tool or management system.

Varieties of e-learning

E-learning comes in many forms. You may have taken one or two forms of e-learning, but have you considered them all?

• Standalone courses. Courses taken by a solo learner. Self-paced without interaction with an instructor or classmates. There are numerous examples of standalone courses cited in this book. Search the index for Using Gantt Charts, GALENA Slope Stability Analysis, and Vision and the Church. You can also go to the Web site for this book (horton.com/eld/) to find links to live examples.

• Virtual-classroom courses. Online class structured much like a classroom course. May or may not include synchronous online meetings. Just such a course is described starting on page 336. Also read Chapter 9, starting on page 415.

• Learning games and simulations. Learning by performing simulated activities that require exploration and lead to discoveries. Read more about games and simulations starting on page 141. Also go to horton.com/eld/ for links to live examples.

• Embedded e-learning. E-learning included in another system, such as a computer program, a diagnostic procedure, or online Help. Learn more about embedded e-learning starting on page 387. Also, view an example at horton.com/eld/.

• Blended learning. Use of various forms of learning to accomplish a single goal. May mix classroom and e-learning or various forms of e-learning. Start reading on page 381.

• Mobile learning. Learning from the world while moving about in the world. Aided by mobile devices such as PDAs and smart phones. Mobile learning examples are shown in Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 10.

• Knowledge management. Broad uses of e-learning, online documents, and conventional media to educate entire populations and organizations rather than just individuals. To learn more about practical knowledge management, go to horton.com/html/whckmt.asp.

And that is just the start. As you read this, clever designers are creating even more forms of e-learning.

WHAT IS E-LEARNING DESIGN?

At its best, e-learning is as good as the best classroom learning. And at its worst, it is as bad as the worst classroom learning. The difference is design.

Creating effective e-learning requires both design and development. Design is not the same as development. Design is decision. Development is doing. Design governs what we do; development governs how we carry out those decisions. Design involves judgment, compromise, tradeoff, and creativity. Design is the 1001 decisions, big and small, that affect the outcome. This book is about design.

Start with good instructional design

Instructional design requires selecting, organizing, and specifying the learning experiences necessary to teach somebody something. Good instructional design is independent of the technology or personnel used to create those learning experiences.

What is instructional design?

In this chapter I use the term instructional design in its broad meaning, which includes pedagogy and androgogy, although my usage is closer to the strict meaning of androgogy (teaching adults) than the limited definition of instructional design popular in some quarters. By instructional design, I definitely do not mean the heavy-handed, Stalinesque distortion of theory required to accompany many ponderous instructional systems design (ISD) methodologies.

Instructional design is a vast subject. This humble chapter cannot cover it all. Here you will find a streamlined, rapid instructional-design method. The process taught here is simple, quick, informal, and pragmatic. Use it as your survival kit when you do not have time or money for more. Or use it as a check on your longer, more formal process.

Before you fast-forward to another chapter with more screen snapshots and fewer diagrams, take a moment to decide whether this chapter might have something to offer you.

Instructional design determines everything else

Instructional design translates the high-level project goals to choices for technology, content, and everything else. The instructional design of e-learning informs decisions on what authoring tools, management systems, and other technologies to buy or license. Instructional design directs the development of content and the selection of media. It orchestrates decisions on budget, schedule, and other aspects of project development. So, design your instruction—at least on paper—before buying any technology or recruiting new staff members.

Please do not skip this chapter

True, not everybody needs to learn about instructional design. To decide whether you need this chapter, ask yourself these questions?

• Has your instructional design education and experience been primarily for the classroom?

• Is your current instructional design methodology too slow and cumbersome to meet your deadlines? Do you need something more rapid and agile?

• Do you like to see an overview of where you are going before you depart on a difficult journey?

• Do you lack either education and experience in instructional design? Perhaps you are a subject-matter expert or instructor who has inherited the responsibility for designing e-learning. Or a manager who needs to evaluate the portfolios of instructional designers you might hire.

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, read on.

Consider multiple perspectives

In e-learning, the responsibility to provoke effective learning experiences may be divided. Successful e-learning design is the result of four main influences, each contributing concerns and capabilities. Producing effective e-learning is a large job requiring several different skills: instructional design, media design, software engineering, and economics.

Each of these influences contributes concepts, procedures, and techniques:

• Instructional design contributes theories about how human beings learn, strategies for applying these theories, and methodologies to carry out the strategies. The knowledge of how human beings learn can guide selection and specification of new kinds of learning experiences such as simulations, learning games, online meetings, and discussion forums.

• Software engineering helps us build reliable computer programs. Like it or not, e-learning is software. It runs on a computer, just as a spreadsheet or word processor does. It has a user-interface and may draw content from a distant database. It transmits media over networks. It thus requires the same careful design and quality control as other forms of software. Software engineering contributes the concepts of object design, usability design, and rapid prototyping.

• Media design helps us use digital media well. When the only media were the words on a chalkboard and the instructor’s voice, we did not need to design media. Today we must select the appropriate mixture of text, graphics, voice, music, sound effects, animation, and video. We must then sequence these various media and synchronize complementary media.

• Economics helps e-learning deliver value. E-learning costs money. It may generate revenue. It takes time, people, and other resources to create, offer, and maintain. It must be developed under a budget and on schedule.

In my experience, one of the most common mistakes is equating e-learning design with instructional design. I have worked with instructional designers who refused to consider any of the other factors. They produced designs that were never produced because they could not be realized with available technologies or cost too much.

The day when one person can comfortably perform all these necessary activities is still a way off. Until then, the joint role of e-learning designer must encompass several disciplines. Why? These disciplines are performed by different specialists and teams, especially in complex projects. The goals of one discipline may conflict with those of another. Business goals may call for a sedate, conservative appearance, while the media designer wants to showcase video and animation.

Many people trained in one discipline lack experience in the others. Instructional designers educated over ten years ago may know little about how to select dynamic electronic media. Even recent grads lack extensive training in animation design or game theory.

Some aspects of e-learning production may be outsourced, along with the detail design for that area. On one recent project, a training company outsourced the instructional design to me, had the software engineering done by their in-house information technology department, and outsourced the production of media to a firm in another country.

True designers—and project leaders—will balance all these concerns and be knowledgeable enough to resolve conflicts, make compromises, and spark innovation.

Design all units of e-learning

Design must be applied at all levels of e-learning from whole curricula down to individual media components. It is important to understand these units because they influence what design techniques we use.

At the top of the pyramid are curricula, such as academic programs that include related courses that lead to a degree or certificate in a subject area. A curriculum could also refer to a library of courses on a certain subject.

Curricula are typically composed of courses, each of which teaches a broad but specific area of a subject. We might also call such units books or knowledge products. Course-level design issues are discussed in Chapter 8.

Courses are composed of clusters of smaller components called lessons. Each lesson is organized to accomplish one of the broad objectives of the course or a cluster of related objectives. Chapter 7 will help you design lessons.

At a lower level are the individual topics, each designed to accomplish a single low-level learning objective. For help designing topics, turn to Chapter 6.

At the bottom level are learning activities, each designed to provoke a specific learning experience. Each activity may answer a specific question or make a point, but they are seldom sufficient to accomplish a learning objective by themselves. Activities are the subject of Chapters 2 though 4. Activities used to measure learning are called tests. They are the subject of Chapter 5.

The middle three units (course, lesson, and topic) may all be designed as self-contained learning objects.

Let’s see how to apply these levels in the real world. Here is a slice down through a single subject area:

DESIGN QUICKLY AND RELIABLY

E-learning benefits most from a rapid, cyclical design process. In this section you will find a minimalist, waste-no-time, results-focused approach to specifying e-learning that actually works. This process omits unnecessary steps and concentrates on the design tasks that really matter.

In the interest of speedy learning, we’ll start with a preview, overview, summary, and job aid all rolled into one. Print it out, enlarge it, and pin it to your wall, where you can refer to it throughout your projects. An Adobe PDF version is available at horton.com/eld/.

The first step in quick instructional design is to clarify the goal of your project. This is a simple two-step procedure. First you nail down what matters to your organization—the one sponsoring development of learning. Is it profit or public service? Return on investment or reputation?

Next you describe how your project will contribute directly to that organizational goal. If you draw a blank at this point, cancel the project now before wasting resources. Once you do define how your project contributes, you have a solid basis to ask for funding and other support.

The next step is to write the learning objective for the course. This objective states how the learner is changed by the course. It describes the end result of taking the course. That objective, however, may have prerequisite objectives. And those second-level objectives may have prerequisites as well. You keep identifying prerequisite objectives until you reach the starting abilities of intended learners.

I use a simple formula to state objectives: Teach blank to blank who blank. That is, teach a subject to a group of people who know certain things already. The first slot records what we intend to teach. It is usually a skill, some knowledge, or an attitude. The second slot records who will learn the subject. It describes a group of learners. The third slot records what aspects of the subject the learners know or can do. Like the first slot, it records a skill, knowledge, or attitude. This last slot represents a prerequisite for the objective. It may point to another objective to satisfy that prerequisite.

Each learning objective requires us to design a learning object to accomplish that objective. Our instructional design of the object requires us to design two types of content: learning activities and tests.

Learners complete learning activities in order to learn. There are usually three types of learning activities required: the learner absorbs knowledge by reading or watching; the learner does practice or discovery activities to deepen learning; and learners complete activities designed to connect what they are learning to their lives and work.

Tests are questions or other assessments to verify that learning occurred and the objective was accomplished.

Don’t worry if this process is not crystal clear. I will explain each of these steps in more detail.

Identify your underlying goal

Design starts with a goal. You may be designing an office building or a monumental sculpture. You may be designing a rocket or an automobile. You may be designing e-learning. Before you can design any of these things, you must know what it is your design must accomplish.

Rather than start listing the things you will accomplish for learners, however, think about what you will do for your employer, your sponsor, or your financial backers. What does your organization hope to accomplish? Your list might look something like this:

• Reduce costs of education by 50% over the next year.

• Quickly prepare a global marketing plan to sell a new line of products.

• Cut misdiagnoses of battery failures by 90%.

• Earn $200,000 by selling courses.

• Recertify 150 nuclear power plant operators.

Keep the organizational goal in mind as you make other decisions. Write this goal on a note card and tack it to your wall. Every day, ask yourself: How am I helping achieve that goal?

Ask what matters

Your overall goal tells you what really matters. To clarify your goal, you need to answer two questions.

The first question is What matters to your organization? We might phrase the question this way: For your company, university, department, government, or institution, what is the single most important measure of success? Try to answer in three words or fewer. That restriction focuses your goal. Three words are plenty. You might say bottom-line profit or return on investment. Or you might say public service or unblemished reputation. On one of our projects, the Gantt Group, a consulting firm specializing in teaching project management, identified their goal as:

For your organization, what is the single most important measure of success? [3 words maximum]

More clients

They figured if they attracted enough clients, revenues and profits would follow.

The second question asks how your project will help accomplish that goal. How will the e-learning you design contribute to that goal? I am not saying your e-learning will accomplish the goal by itself, but you certainly should be able to state how it will contribute. If you cannot convincingly and honestly argue that your project contributes to the goal, consider canceling the project now. Without such alignment with organizational goals, your project may run out of money, time, and management support. Better to stop now before antagonizing the management of your organization by wasting organizational resources on an endeavor that does not matter to the organization.

Let’s look at how this question was answered for the Gantt Group:

How will your project help accomplish that goal?

Convince potential clients that understanding Gantt charts can make them more successful project managers (and that the Gantt Group is the source for that understanding).

The proposed project was aimed at garnering more clients by convincing potential clients that understanding Gantt charts, which are a common tool of project management, could make them more successful and that the Gantt Group was the source for that understanding.

Make your organization’s goal your goal

Create a bridge connecting a high-priority goal of your organization and the learning objectives of your e-learning so both business managers and instructional designers see the value of e-learning to the organization. Notice how this statement provides just such a bridge:

Most misdiagnoses of battery problems are caused by lack of knowledge among customer-support technicians about the modes of battery failure and the symptoms they can produce. By training customer-support technicians, we can reduce the rate of misdiagnosis by at least 90%.

About half of the designers I have worked with stubbornly refuse to consider the underlying organizational goal when designing instruction. They do not feel that organizational goals are their responsibility. They design courses that accomplish little—or that die for lack of organizational support. This is tragic because it only takes two questions to align learning objectives to organizational goals.

Consider a wide range of goals

Organizational goals are not limited to profit or return-on-investment. Peruse your organization’s annual report or replay speeches by your organization’s leaders. Observe what your leaders emphasize as the values and goal of the organization.

Set learning objectives

Good objectives are a mission-critical, sin qua non, must-have, make-or-break requirement for effective e-learning. Forgive me for stacking up so many adjectives, but without exception clear objectives make everything go better. In my experience, well over half the failures of e-learning projects would have been prevented by clear objectives.

Everything stems from the objectives. From the objectives, we identify prerequisites, select learning activities, and design tests. Good objectives focus efforts, reduce false starts, and cut waste enormously.

Write your learning objectives

Once you have clarified the goal of your project, you can write the primary learning objective for your course. This objective states what the course will accomplish.

There are many opinions on how to write objectives and complete methodologies on just how to phrase objectives. Search amazon.com for books by Robert Mager or Robert Gagné and you will find some examples. For quick instructional design, however, I use a single, simple formula that works well almost all the time. It states learning objectives in three parts. First, the objective states the intent, that is, what will be taught. Second, it identifies the target learner. Third, it identifies starting requirements.

For the example of the course Using Gantt Charts, the top-level objective of the course was to teach how to shorten projects. It was to teach this subject to mid-level managers. But those managers had to know how to recognize the critical path in a Gantt chart.

For our quick objective, the first slot records what we want to teach. Usually it is to do something, make a decision, or create something.

The second slot records the group of people we want to accomplish this objective. If an entire course is aimed at a single group of people, this slot may have the same answer for every objective in the course.

The final slot records the prerequisites necessary to make accomplishing the objective practical. Prerequisites are usually stated as the skills, knowledge, and attitudes learners must possess. The prerequisites slot can have multiple answers, but the teach slot has only a single skill, item of knowledge, or attitude.

What makes a good objective?

Good learning objectives are clear, precise, and worthy. Let’s look at each of these requirements.

Clear

A learning objective should be clear to everyone involved with it. The objective must tell the project’s management team what you intend to accomplish. It must give the media designer specific marching orders. And it must communicate the what’s in it for me to the learner.

Precise

The learning objective must specify the required learning in enough detail that we can measure its accomplishment. You may be thinking that what we have listed as an objective is not complete or precise enough. Correct. Right now, it is more of a goal. But don’t worry; we will tighten it up considerably.

My advice is don’t get too precise too soon. Early in a project, it is more important to write down all your objectives briefly than to specify them in excruciating detail. Once you have all your learning goals spread out in front of you and have eliminated unnecessary ones, you can flesh them out one at a time.

Worthy

Your learning objective must directly contribute to accomplishing the underlying organizational goal. Responsible developers continually check their objectives against the organizational goal.

Types of objectives

Some complex methodologies for writing objectives list hundreds of different types of objectives. I list six types of objectives—three primary and three secondary. Applied with sensitivity and common sense, they suffice 95% of the time.

Instructional intent can be expressed in the following format. This format consists of a standard preamble and one of six possible completions.

By experiencing this lesson or topic, the learner will be able to:

Primary and secondary objectives

Objectives can be primary or secondary. Primary objectives are the ultimate reasons for learning while secondary objectives enable accomplishment of the primary objective, even though they are seldom the targeted result.

Both are important, but the primary objectives are the ones you must teach to accomplish your overall objective. Primary objectives are performance objectives in that they prescribe things people will be able to do as a result of your e-learning. As such they are sometimes called terminal objectives. But they can also be enabling objectives, that is, things you teach so that learners can learn the terminal objectives. Secondary objectives are always enabling objectives. They are not the main goal, but may be essential nonetheless to accomplish the primary objectives.

So, if you write the overall objective for your e-learning and it looks like one of the secondary objectives here, reconsider. Ask yourself, why do you want someone to believe, feel, or know something? What will meeting such an objective accomplish? The answer to these questions pinpoints your primary objective.

I have not made a big deal about separating cognitive, affective, and psychomotor objectives. Most real-world tasks involve components of all three. For example to perform CPR, you must know the steps of the procedure (cognitive), know how the procedure varies for infants (cognitive), have courage (affective), remain calm (affective), perform coordinated movements (psychomotor), and adjust the procedure based on sounds and tactile sensations (psychomotor).

Primary objectives state your goals

Primary objectives are the goals your e-learning should accomplish. Primary objectives are stated in terms of performance, that is, what the learner will be able to do.

The following table lists the various forms of primary instructional objectives and provides examples of statements of each form.

You may be accustomed to writing objectives in terms of skills, knowledge, and attitudes. If so, just remember that skills typically require do or create objectives. Attitudes use decide objectives to ask whether the learner consistently makes choices indicated by the attitude.

Do not fret if your objectives are not 100% clear at this point. You will further clarify your objectives when you design tests to measure accomplishment of the objective.

Secondary objectives help accomplish goals

Secondary objectives teach something necessary to accomplish a primary objective. They state what the learner will know, believe, or feel.

Spell out the situation

We teach so that learners can apply what they learn, not merely accumulate knowledge. People apply knowledge, skills, and attitudes in real-world situations. As part of the objective, we need to specify what those situations are. That way, designers can tailor the design to accomplishing results in these situations. Situation is a pretty broad term. It can include three main factors: events that trigger application of learning, conditions under which the learner must act, and resources the learner will need in order to apply learning.

Trigger

What events will trigger application of the learning? What must the learner recognize as a cue to act? Will the learner receive explicit prompts to apply learning? Or will the learner need to infer the need for action from subtle cues in the environment? Is this an action that is applied periodically to a schedule?

Conditions

Under what conditions does the learner perform the action? In what environment does the learner act? Where does the action take place? How noisy is the environment? Is it especially hot or cold? How much room does the learner have? Is lighting adequate? Is the learner subject to frequent interruptions?

Resources

What resources can the learner draw on? Books? Calculators? Access to the Web? Memory only? What assistance will the learner have? A supervisor to guide the learner? Peers with whom to discuss problems?

Set criteria for success

What degree of success will learners accomplish? We like to think that all learners will be perfectly successful in accomplishing the intended results. Ironically, though, designing for a goal of perfect performance often leads to worse, not better, results. Thus, for each objective, we should state realistically how successful learners should be in applying what they learn.

Quantifying the degree of success is not easy, but we can at least set metrics such as these:

• Percent of learners who will accomplish the objective perfectly.

• Average error rate.

• Time required to perform the task.

• Results produced in a specified period of time.

• Reduction in frequency of problems or increase in rate of favorable incidents.

Examples of complete learning objectives

Here are some examples of learning objectives from different courses:

Analyze learners’ needs and abilities

Whose knowledge, skills, and attitudes are you trying to alter? Research the groups of potential learners until you can answer these questions:

• What are the learners’ current levels of knowledge, biases, skills, and attitudes?

• What are their expectations and attitudes toward learning?

• What motivates them to learn?

• How well prepared are they to use e-learning technologies?

Such intimate knowledge may require conducting surveys, interviews, and testing. I use a form like this to summarize the characteristics of each group of learners who will take my e-learning:

Consider defined curricula

When setting objectives for a course or curricula, consider whether someone has already defined the required body of knowledge or skills to be taught. For the area of your course or curriculum, are requirements defined by:

• Government regulations?

• Certification or licensing procedures?

• Standard reference works?

• Professional associations?

• Standardized academic curricula?

Such definitions can save you months of research and debate in defining learning objectives of your project.

Teach essential skills

Instruction is only effective if it teaches the right things. One common problem occurs when we teach low-level, explicit knowledge that learners already know, could figure out on their own, or will never apply. For instance, many courses on computer operations teach typing rather than the skills really needed to use the computer successfully.

For example, this portion of a simulation requires learners to type numbers into the cells of a grid.

The problem with this approach is that it focuses attention on the task of typing in numbers. It encourages tunnel vision that distracts from the more important task of teaching what goes into the grid.

Typing skills are not the critical skill. The critical skill is entering the right pattern of data. This revision of the activity focuses attention on the relationships among values rather than merely typing numerals.

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Identify prerequisites

No project of any complexity will have just a single, simple learning objective. Whatever the top-level learning objective, it has prerequisites that you must identify. Such prerequisites specify the skills and knowledge learners must possess before they can begin to accomplish the main objective.

Spot related objectives

Starting with the top objective, the design identifies a cascade of prerequisite objectives. As an example, let’s look at the top objective for the course Using Gantt Charts. It is to teach how to shorten projects to mid-level managers who can interpret the critical path. Fine, but not all mid-level managers will already know how to interpret the critical path.

That means we need another lower-level objective to meet that prerequisite. This objective would require teaching how to interpret the critical path. It would be aimed at the same mid-level managers as before. This new objective has its own prerequisite, namely, the ability to interpret Gantt charts in general.

Interpreting Gantt charts in turn requires objectives on how to interpret task bars and how to interpret task dependencies. Both of these two new objectives are prerequisites of the prior objective.

Thus, objectives develop in a cascade downward from the top-level learning objective as we repeatedly ask what the learner must know before beginning an objective.

State objectives in shorthand

My formula for writing objectives is simple, but writing dozens of objectives can become tedious. Perhaps that is why many designers skip all that work and just begin developing content. Resist that urge. If you want to, you can streamline the process by writing objectives in a shorthand fashion.

To streamline the statement of an objective, state just what the learner will be able to do after accomplishing the objective. Teach how to shorten projects to mid-level managers who can interpret the critical path becomes just shorten projects. Our next objective becomes just interpret the critical path. And our final two objectives become just interpret task bars and interpret task dependencies.

We can streamline the statement of objectives because the learners are typically similar throughout an entire course and because the prerequisite for a higher-level objective becomes the subject for the next objective down the cascade.

This shorthand works best when the objective is stated in the grammatical form that expresses it as a task the learner will be able to accomplish. The first part of this grammatical form is an active verb, such as interpret or shorten. The second part is a phrase representing the direct object of the verb, that is, what the verb acts on. This format keeps the focus on performance.

Here’s a best practice for you. The best tools for cataloging your streamlined learning objectives are a whiteboard or Post-it® notes because they make it easy for you to change your mind.

Hierarchy of learning objectives

Our cascade of learning objectives and their prerequisites naturally forms a tree-structure or hierarchy. For example, let’s look at the analysis that was conducted for the Using Gantt Charts course. It started with the top-level objective, to teach how to shorten projects to mid-level managers who can interpret the critical path.

For that objective, I identified two prerequisites, namely the ability to interpret the critical path (which I mentioned earlier) and to manage projects generally. Interpreting the critical path had prerequisites of the ability to recognize the critical path, interpret task bars, and interpret task dependencies. Recognizing the critical path required the ability to define the critical path and distinguish non-critical paths from critical paths. Interpreting task bars required the ability to recognize task bars, to read the chart grid, and to recognize float lines. Interpreting task dependencies required the ability to recognize dependency markers and to distinguish milestones from dependency markers. Recognizing markers required the ability to recognize three types of markers: start-finish, partial completion, and lagging starts. The actual analysis was a bit more complex than this, but essentially of the same structure.

Looking at this tidy hierarchy, it is tempting to proceed to the next step. We should not do so without dealing with some of the traps that often lurk at this stage. For one thing, some of the objectives may be too basic or too vast to fit within the scope of the project. For example, the objective of being able to manage projects is too elemental to fit in a course on using Gantt charts.

Another trap in such a neat hierarchy is that we may assume it represents all the prerequisite relationships. A closer look reveals that distinguishing non-critical from critical paths requires the ability to recognize float lines and to read the chart grid, which were earlier identified as prerequisites for interpreting task bars. The relationships among objectives are clearly not a simple hierarchy.

Scanning the lower-level objectives may also cause us to question whether some objectives are too detailed or esoteric to be included directly. We might consider omitting these objectives or putting them in reference materials. One suspect area is the details about the different types of dependency markers.

One final trap is to automatically adopt this hierarchy as the structure for the course menu. Sometimes that is a good idea, but often it is not, especially if we feel that prerequisites should be taught first.

Identify prerequisites

How do we quickly and systematically identify the prerequisites for a specific objective? There is no magic formula, but careful analysis of objectives will help. For example, we might identify component skills as prerequisites. Component skills are lower-level parts of a higher-level skill. For example, if a procedure has five steps, each step might be a component skill of that procedure. Another category of prerequisites is definitions. Unless learners have the basic vocabulary of a field, they cannot learn the more advanced aspects of that field. Concepts may be needed when we want to go beyond rote learning and enable creative problem-solving. Rules and regulations may be required to inform learners of the constraints on how they can apply their learning. Here are some common prerequisites for different types of objectives:

Decide how to accomplish prerequisites

The second part of our inquiry into prerequisites concerns how we deal with these prerequisites. The stock, standard, default response is to just keep adding objectives. That is the process used in constructing the hierarchy of objectives for Using Gantt Charts.

Another alternative may be to let learners figure out the prerequisites by trial and error or by discovery learning. Many learners may welcome the challenge of filling in bits of missing information. Or we could teach the prerequisites as part of teaching the objective they support. We could select learning activities that are rich enough to teach some prerequisite objectives as well as the main objective. Still another approach is to teach learners how to look up the information on their own. If objectives can be met by accessing freely available Internet resources, why develop new learning content to meet the objective? We could also target fewer learners. If only a few of the targeted learners lack certain prerequisites, it may not make sense to develop content for just those few.

The option of adding more objectives should not be our automatic response to a prerequisite. E-learning seldom succeeds when it tries to accomplish too many objectives.

Decide the teaching sequence of your objectives

Once you have identified what objectives you must teach, you need to decide the order in which learners will accomplish these objectives. You can defer this decision until you have created learning objects, but only if your objects are designed with no assumptions about which objects learners will have taken earlier. Beware the as-shown-abovesyndrome (p. 313).

One way to manage this decision is to make a preliminary strategic decision early in the design process and then to refine the decision on later design revisions. To that end, you can use the ideas here to decide a sequencing strategy and then those of Chapter 7 to craft purpose-specific learning sequences.

In what order you we teach? To decide, let’s return to the hierarchy of learning objectives. Three main sequences are possible.

The most common sequence is bottom up. In a bottom-up sequence, we teach prerequisite objectives before objectives that require these prerequisites. Makes sense. Unless we teach the prerequisite first, learners could become confused or frustrated.

A second sequencing strategy is top down. In a top-down sequence we start learners at the top objective, as if they have all the prerequisites. Learners who lack prerequisites can continue down the hierarchy to access the objects that teach prerequisites they lack.

The third sequencing strategy is sideways. Here we let learners traverse the subject freely, discovering and satisfying prerequisites as encountered.

Example: Bottom-up sequencing

The course Good Clinical Practice had a bottom-up structure. This course dealt with a critical subject with life-or-death consequences. Its goal was to teach experienced medical researchers to follow regulations and ethical practices in conducting tests on human subjects, some of whom had died due to lapses by researchers.

The structure of the course is made evident by the Next button in the lower right, suggesting a strongly recommended path through the course.

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The legal concerns were great. The course was mandatory. Every learner was required to complete every page of the course. A sequential structure aided that goal.

Let’s look at the sequence of topics within a lesson on obtaining the informed consent of test subjects before conducting experiments on them. The lesson starts with a definition of informed consent as this is the basis of the whole lesson. Next, the lesson introduces the general principles of informed consent that will guide the researcher. Next are spelled out the specific elements of the document used to record informed consent. After that come details of the process through which the document goes to fully secure and document informed consent.

With all the background established, the lesson now provides specific details about obtaining consent from the test subject. Finally, it specifies the requirements the researcher must follow to document informed consent. The following pages provide a practice activity and a summary.

Did you notice how the lesson carefully begins with definitions, fundamental concepts, and contextual background before presenting the exact procedure the researcher must follow. That order is a classic example of the bottom-up sequence.

Example: Top-down sequencing

Let’s look at an example of a top-down sequence. This example teaches operation of the GALENA Slope Stability Analysis computer program which is used to analyze the stability of earthen dams, road cuts, surface mines, and other slopes.

After an introduction, the course starts with a preview of the entire process of using the program. As part of this preview, the learner can select a show-me demonstration (p. 54). The demonstration provides a narrated, over-the-shoulder look at the use of the program to analyze an earthen dam. The demonstration is complete. If that is all the learner needs, the learner can quit the training and begin using the program.

If not, the learner can continue for more detailed instruction on how to perform each of the steps shown in the overview.

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For example, if the learner selects the Material profiles step, the lesson on how to define the cross section of a slope model appears. Note that this lesson also has