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Hi, I’m Ryan Woods, Docebo’s Course Developer. I spend most of my work hours designing the content you see in Docebo University, so I do a lot of thinking about how to engineer training that’s engaging, effective, and useful. 

Because so many community members are strategizing learning materials day in and day out, I thought I’d kick off a conversation talking shop. Here are 4 considerations I always entertain before developing training content. I’d love to hear more about what you do to make your content work for your learners, so don’t be shy!

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Ever wonder why a course you’ve created doesn’t engage users like you’d hoped it would? Do learners not acquire the skills they need, even though you presented all the information they need to develop proficiency? How do your courses fit in your learning ecosystem? :bulb:

These questions vex instructional designers, course developers, and learning content experts. While there’s a lot of great information out there addressing these challenges, here I’m going to share what’s worked for me.

1. Start from the end, not the beginning.

Coined “reverse design”  (or “backwards design”) by its proponents, this approach begins by asking, “What should learners know and be able to do by the end of this training?” Once you’ve answered this question, shape your content around reaching these objectives. Don’t be afraid to cut sections, activities, and lessons that don’t support these goals. You’ll streamline your course creation this way. :ballot_box_with_check:

2. Know your audience.

Are you authoring a course for employees, customers, or partners? Are your learners familiar with a technical process, or will you need to explain and demonstrate it? Where are your audiences in their learning journey? In what contexts will they be accessing your training? 

Getting clear on your audience’s needs will help ensure you’re delivering meaningful content that feels relevant. You might begin by creating learner personas :busts_in_silhouette:(here, some of your best resources are from marketing templates for charting out customer journeys) and mapping out learner journeys. :motorway: 

 

3. Understand your media.

You should select media that best communicates your message. The media you leverage -- whether a quiz, an interaction, a demo video, an observation checklist, or other object -- must reflect your content goals and your learning audience’s needs. Choose wisely. :desktop::iphone::movie_camera::book: 

 

4. Measure what counts.

How do you continuously improve your learning culture? :thinking:

Such a multifaceted question deserves a multifaceted answer, and we don’t have the space to elaborate here.

But measurement has to form a part of any strategy for making progress. Why? Well, without it, you can neither prove the impact of your learning, nor improve what’s there. :chart_with_upwards_trend:

A good place to start is by applying criteria suggested by the Kirkpatrick model to your course. Given the goals you and your audience have, how would you measure the reactions, learning, behaviors, and results you hope to drive with your content?

Were these recommendations helpful? What would you add or change? Let me know in the comments. 👇    

Hi Ryan,

This is a great summary. I think it’s worth adding at the very beginning is a needs analysis, which is when you check whether your project is actually meeting a need and addressing an issue that is important to business goals. There’s also the whole question as to whether training is the right solution - sometimes a job aid like a checklist is all that is needed! 

 

I’ve enjoyed using your courses on Docebo U - both as a learner and looking at your technique as fellow learning designer. 

 

Sara

That’s a great point, @Sara Tindall. We recently conducted an informal needs analysis for a proposed course on how to use our learning and support resources. At first, I wasn’t sure we needed a full-blown course to train our customers -- after all, there are plenty of existing resources, and we have dedicated personnel working directly on this. But the more I learned, the more I became convinced that creating a course could be really helpful to recently-onboarded clients. Without spending the time to research the need for the course, I probably would have dismissed the idea out of hand. Key step! (And as a result, I’m hoping the course will be ready in a few weeks!)  

That is so great to hear. With learning design I am a huge fan of two things: needs analysis and evaluation. Without these done right, the rest of your work is likely to end up being a waste of time. If you haven't already, spend time with your colleague Laurent aka he-who-knows-all-about-Formetris. (I'm his No.1 fan) He makes such a clear and concise case for the importance of aligning training to business goals and impact analysis.

I usually start the discussion by asking what they expect to see as outputs; mainly on reports. I found this help to drive our expertise to help with some of the basics like, course type, content type, etc. It also helps the ‘design teams to understand that we certain constraints we need to work within and forces them to think of a project as not just adding a course, some content and placing it in a catalogue.

This is such a great post and thread, the summary is a great reminder for anyone creating new courses. 

One thing I would add is understand the generations completing your courses. While this fits into the “Know your Audience Piece” I will take it one step further. I work in a location where I have people starting their first job at 18 side by side with people who are within a few years of retirement.  Not only do I have to be aware of their Learning Styles and their previous life experience or job knowledge I have to be aware that short bursts of interactive content work well for the majority some days, but others just want to read the info and take away the how and why.

It’s a fine line to walk but the variety is necessary, it’s also something that can take me down quite the rabbit hole when I’m not in good development space or at times even cause me to overthink something that I need to keep simple!

I absolutely agree Stephanie, ‘know your audience’ in fundamental.  You can produce the most amazing piece of learning content...but it can also be totally unsuitable for the people and context who will be using it.  We have a user audience who is very time poor and they just want to learn and go right now.

Another great post, Ryan! 
 

Building on #1 from a learner perspective, I always appreciate understanding “what’s in it for me” at the beginning of the course. A soft skills course can mean very different things for different learners in different roles, so little clips at the beginning of the course that personalize it to me in sales, is something I love. 
 

A lot of our courses in The Vault (Docebo’s internal LMS) have evolved and look this way now and it helps me to better understand where to spend the limited amounts of time I have each week to devote to learning. 

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