In many ways, good instructional
design is just common sense, combined with decades of observation about what
works and what doesn't when teaching adult learners. Here are 10 basic tips to
sharpen your own training programs:
- Know your
audience. Understand what they bring to the table, and what they need from
each course. Determine your audience's education level, entry knowledge,
and their goals in taking the course. This will
help you identify their performancegap-between what they
already know and can do, and what they need to know and be able to do.
- Use learning
(or performance) objectives to nail down what your learners are supposed
to know and be able to do, once they have completed the course. Your
learning objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant
(or Results-oriented), and Targeted to the audience. These
learning objectives will help to guide your development of course
content and provide a yardstick for measuring
how well learners have mastered it.
- Using these
learning objectives as a guide, keep your course content pertinent to the
task at hand. Keep the information in your course focused and relevant,
with a minimum of extraneous detail. And “chunk” course
content into small, digestible bites of information.
- Use the
variety of media available in e-Learning to serve
different learning styles, such as auditory and visual learners. Use
narration, graphics, and text, but not necessarily all at the same time.
- Spell out the
“WIFM” (What’s in it for me?) for your learners. Adult learners want to
know why they are learning something, and how it will help them on the
job. This might easily be the most important tip!
- Adult learners
generally prefer to have some-or even a lot-of control over the learning
process. They want to take responsibility for their own learning. This
favors using self-paced instruction, providing tools for assessing one’s
own progress, and implementing the freedom to choose among different
learning activities (where possible).
- Provide a
“gate” that learners must pass before they advance to more difficult
content. This may be a test, a demonstration, or a role-play activity.
- Related to the
above, if your students possess different backgrounds and levels of
experience, consider using a pre-test to “sort them out,” and even
allowing the more advanced learners to “opt out” of content that is too
elementary for them.
- Once you have
constructed a course, have actual
learners, not just other developers, test it. They can provide real-world
insight and feedback that you can use to improve the course.
- Consider
developing “job
aids,” “cheat sheets,” “quick reference
cards,” or other reminders based on your course content, which learners
can easily access while they are on the job.
In short, understanding your
learners’ needs, and applying common sense to meet them, will dramatically
improve your training programs.
