Coming from the education world, I was taught how to write lesson plans in a very formulaic way. I had a hard time adapting my multiple activities to a specific plan, and relied mostly on a bulleted list, keeping the end goal as the guide to my plan. This remains the way I storyboard eLearning courses, and it has served me well.
However, I recently came across Cathy Moore’s incredibly helpful eLearning site at Cathy Moore. Her insistence that we train the way that people learn, and not the way that the information is given to us struck a chord with me, and has gotten me to start thinking about the pre-work I do before I build a course.
I’m currently working on a course about the different categories of a widget and how to get the customers to purchase the correct widget. I started off with a bulleted list, but now I’m thinking that I should plan the activity first, then the information that centers around said activity.
Cathy refers to this method as Action Planning, and I love the term. While online training can be a staid, boring click click click activity, I’m working hard to show that there are alternatives. My role as an instructional designer/architect is to improve the performance of external learners, so my question to myself and the others I work with is: What are we doing today to improve people for tomorrow. Action Planning resonates with me, and I hope you might be able to apply it to your next elearning project.
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