@gstager 

I use three things to decide how linear or not I go when designing a curriculum.

• The needs of the content - If the content needs scaffolding, then no way would I let the learner have full control.
• The predominant learning style of my audience - which I learn thru surveying them
• Whether content mastery is required for their jobs.

The higher on a scale that the answers to these criteria are, the more linear my curriculum.

Regards,

KM

Great question @gstager.

I like to lock content, & honestly I think it’s just b/c the employer through which I learned the most about eLearn development used that method. My current team do not tend to lock content, which is fine - it generally saves me writing additional triggers around when buttons become available, or what to do when revisiting a slide - but I don’t prefer it. Not so badly that I argue or anything, it just sort of works against what I was taught.

My previous employer would often lock content, but still present everything in a non-linear fashion. So you would get a menu & you could visit the topics in any order, but you could not access the test until you had visited all content. And once my Project Manager asked me to add triggers so a user could start down one topic, navigate back to the menu before completing, but then when they revisited that topic it would take them back to where they left off. I think it took me a full day to come up w/ all the triggers for that, & I had to make multiple layers on the menu slide that just followed a set of essentially if/then statements to decide where to navigate anytime someone clicked a button. I don’t miss doing something that complicated.

But, yes, I will develop either way without complaint, but when given the option - as long as it’s not too complex - I would opt for locked navigation.

I am at where @KMallette is Greg.

Depends on the needs of the project, the maturity of the curriculum, and how critical content mastery is necessary.

Locked navigation helps typically in the compliance circles - but that is a seriously generalized statement.

Free navigation helps when we treat adult learners like they are adult learners - it tends to work better with soft skill training another seriously generalized statement.

I have some authoring software that leans into both well. I have others that don't do locked navigation well.

Hammer/Screwdriver/Saw - break out the tool to support the need for the project at the time.

I like a mixed approach personally, tiers of content. Once within a tier I can move around within it but certain pieces must be completed prior to getting the next tier. 
 

If there are scaffolding requirements of courses, I either separate them within the tiers or make it clear in the content when a course is launched. 

I come from a Montessori background so I suppose the core “follow the child” and “the material provides boundaries for success” concepts have been engrained and stuck with me, but I also like to allow people to move between topics how they like. If I require a specific course first and someone knows that’s the next topic and they avoid it (think of your least favorite subject’s homework in high school) less likely to look forward to returning to do more learning. If I get to choose when I do that least favorite one, at least other courses are being accomplished until I’m in the mood. 

Taking this topic to another level, I am hugely negative about forced controls within a course, I.e. required time on page and similar controls, it focuses too much on preventing bad behaviors and not focusing on engaging content and building in natural blocks for people trying to go around. After all, there are always ways to get around “locks”. 
 

When I was a high school teacher - the issue of cheating and assessments always came up and my approach was based on the path of least resistance. I tried to make it easier to do the work than to cheat. I once had a hybrid course where I was met with a slew of typical questions like this one.

Student: “How many tests will we have?” 

Me: “None”

Students: …

They really thought I was joking.

Students: “Not even a final!?”

Me: “Nope, not even a final.”

Students: “So how are you grading us?”

It was a great experiment and I spent a great deal of time convincing administration to let me do it but I think it was a class that walked away with the most learning of any class I had taught. I had lots of things for them to do over the semester but only one thing was going to be graded. They were going to build a website. A website that would serve as a portfolio of everything they had learned over the semester. A Home page and an additional page for each course section where they would summarize their learning and include several artifacts as evidence. Easier to do the work than to cheat.

With my adult learners - I have always leaned towards just putting the content out there and saying “here is everything you need to know about ‘X’ Topic and allowing them to tackle the content in whatever order they choose and to spend as much time on each object as they need. I will place the content in the suggested order of approach but I also like to be sensitive to prior knowledge and if someone is already proficient at something - I don’t see the need to force them to watch long videos, etc of the topic. That is something that has always rubbed me the wrong way. So I lean towards all content as optional for that reason. As adults - the stakes are a little different - we want to keep our jobs or perhaps we would like to get one… So if you don’t put in the effort - that’s on you.

The most recent course I built has several topics and each one ends with a small quiz and these are graded but not meant to be part of the overall tally. That honor goes to an assignment dropbox where I expect a video of the learner performing several tasks that were taught in the course along with a couple other deliverables. The course has two “paths”. One for your own personal professional development and one for a certificate of completion. If you want the certificate - you submit the final assignment as adequate evidence of learning.

Is that more work for me? Yup but I feel it is worth it to help others to be more successful at what they do.

Like many others, however, it can be difficult to escape the desire for control from upper management.

We do a hybrid. Our curriculum is generally split into Fundamentals courses and Advanced courses. We want people to take the Fundamentals before moving on to the Advanced. The major benefit of this is for the VILT experience for both our instructors and customer students. Students that try to jump into the advanced without knowing the basics tend to get frustrated because they don’t know the concepts that the course assumes the should already know. It also causes the instructor to have to stop and go back to basic concepts which breaks up the flow of the course for everyone involved. We keep the advanced courses behind a prerequisite wall of a yearly exam. The Fundamental course will prep them for the exam, complete the exam, then take the advanced courses in any order that you’d like.  

Another advantage to this approach i have found is you have built in benchmarks along the way for:

• monitoring substantial progress
• automating notifications for achievements
• automating feedback on sections of content

In my faculty support days I used to try to get the faculty onboard with this kind of setup instead of focusing on how to ‘lock down’ the tests or computer labs. There are always was to get around these things, its a losing game and putting the focus where it shouldn't be. The project thing, if done well always stood out for me as a clear winner too as if you structured it right, like it sounds like you did here, its very easy for the prof to grade, as it is clear if it works, and if things are there, very clear cut. Never understood why that never landed as they would complain about all the time it takes to read and grade traditional evaluation methods.

All for treating adults like adults. At times though, we must succumb to our better judgement for drivers like speed to product, voice of the subject matter expert, and voice of the customer.

@gstager We use a combination of groups, pages, and menus to drive a graduated approach to content. When a new hire first logs in they belong to the New Hire group automatically based on their title. New Hires-Cashiers as an example. On the page they can see is a focused selection of company and role orientation courses. BUT, not displayed on this page yet available to them is the All Content catalog. That way if our Store Manager (we’re a retailer) wants them to take something not in the orientation set, they can still access it.

As they finish orientation, we have the regular Cashiers group that has a membership rule of the orientation courses = completed so they get automatically added to this group when they finish those courses. This group’s menu is higher up in the order so they will see this group’s page automatically when they are added to the group (again, automatically once they finish orientation). THAT page has all relevant content catalogs available. 

Thanks for the comment, @spotratz - drilling in a little further, once the learner is in one of your courses do you find that progress is along a forced path or can they choose a sequence to work through the material?

We let them jump around but set a few dependencies on things like taking a knowledge check before watching the material. I could count our exceptions to that on one hand with a few fingers missing.