How to Design a Training Course

Creating a course for any learning situation can be done following a simple step-by-step process. It can be as complex or as simple as you need it to be, considering your audience. Do you want to train someone on a concept? Or teach someone how to do something? Follow these steps and your course will be easy to teach and easy to learn from.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• An idea for a course
• A purpose for the course
• Course Objectives
• Objective Measures
• Information for the content,deliverables, and assessments.

1. Decide on a topic for your course and write a one-two sentence description. What will the course be about? What will learners get from the course?

2. Write a one-two sentence purpose for the course. Why will anyone want to take the course? What can they do once they complete the course?

3. Review the description and the purpose and decide on one to three objectives. To help write the objectives, think of an action verb and connect it to something that the learner will be able to do once the course is completed. Example: Upon completion, the learner will be able to design (action verb) a complete course.

4. Look at each of the objectives you have stated and write a statement that will tell the learner how the stated objective will be measured. This is what the instructor will use to evaluate the learner's comprehension of the course. For the objective above, a measure could be: Design a course, complete with description, purpose, objectives, measures, deliverables, and assessments.

5. Divide the course into learning sessions - you can do this by looking at the objectives and creating a session for each objective or pair of related objectives. Determine how long each session will last. If the course is online, four days for each learning session is about right. If the course is face to face, a learning session can be one meeting, four hours, or two meetings, two hours. You decide how much time you need to teach the objective and measure the outcome in each session.

6. For each session you will need content. You can find content online by doing keyword searches. Copy and paste the links to articles you find that are relevant to your topic into the course plan. You can also recommend magazines and/or books for your learners to read.

7. Design activities that will utilize the reading material. These activities can be discussions, reports, or projects. They can be individual assignments or group assignments. They can be graded or not. These activities can be used as assessments to determine if the learner has met the objectives through the measurement standards listed.

8. The final step in each learning session is to review the material covered, the activities completed, and the assessments done to ensure that the objective and measures have been met.

Tips & Warnings

• To determine if the learners increased their skill or knowledge, administer a pre-assessment prior to the class starting and a post-assessment when the course is over.
• The easiest way to do a pre-and post-assessment is to take the objectives and turn them into multiple choice questions. For example: Select the appropriate response to the following statement: At this time I am able to design a complete course. Responses: a) All the time; b) Some of the time; c) None of the time.
• Use the same assessment at the end of the course and compare responses to the pre-assessment to determine increase in skill or knowledge level.

[mlt34]

on 10/1/2009 Well written article about a training course!

[perceptive]

on 9/25/2009 Your article is a 'training course' in itself! Very informative and thorough! Thanks, 5***** and a recommendation!

[promax]

on 2/7/2009 Great info.

[bossypants]

on 2/3/2009 Good direction. Evaluation is key, for the learner's confidence and to measure the success of the training course! Thanks!

[MarlaineMarie]

on 10/1/2008 Nicely written! You should write a course on this! 5 Stars! Smiling!