Curriculum Design

A well designed curriculum aligns with your company’s business goal and is defined by specific, action-oriented learning objectives. As an exercise it follows a logical sequence of inter-related steps that, as they are completed, inform a complete strategy.

Our curriculum design service defines a strategy for your learning program and provides specific recommendations in the areas identified below. Click on each item for details on what each portion of the strategy covers.

 

Audience Profile
At the heart of every effective curriculum is a clear understanding of who the intended audience is. Our comprehensive audience analysis helps you define the following with respect to your learners:


Technical Specifications
A curriculum is only as effective as the underlying technologies available to deliver it. At the start of an engagement we will analyze your IT infrastructure to identify technical aspects already in place to support a proposed design. We’ll also identify deficiencies in infrastructure that must be corrected prior to implementation or whose limitations must be factored into the design of the curriculum.

To define the technical specifications for your curriculum we will consider the following features of your IT infrastructure:

Business Goals & Learning Objectives
An effective curriculum is designed to enable an audience to support your business goals and/or solve a business challenge. To do this it must also be designed with precise learning objectives to ensure it is aligned with your needs. Our curriculum experts can help you define or refine parameters by articulating objectives that are specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-bound.

Curriculum Map
A curriculum map charts the path through which your learners complete elements of a program. It defines every learning event in terms of its delivery mechanism, learning objectives addressed, estimated duration, and prerequisites.

At the program level, a curriculum map defines the name of each module as well as the sequence through which learners move from one to the next. It also establishes prerequisites and passing thresholds for each.

At the module level, a curriculum map organizes content areas into manageable segments. It specifies how information and concepts are organized by topic and establishes a logical flow from one topic to the next. It also divides content into discreet modules.

Source Content and Subject-matter Experts
Convergent Learning strongly advocates for the identification (and creation) of source content that aligns with defined objectives…and not the other way around. While this approach may increase time frames and require a greater level of commitment, we feel it is the best way to ensure that a curriculum’s components meet its stated objectives.

There are three exercises associated with source-content definition:

  1. Analyze existing source content and establish how well it supports stated learning objectives. The output of this is a map that aligns specific content with specific objectives.
  2. Identify content gaps. These are areas where no content exists to support one or more stated learning objectives.
  3. Define a strategy for filling gaps.

Delivery of Instructional Components
Core to every curriculum is a strategy that defines the modalities through which curriculum elements are delivered. Once we define learning objectives we can select the most appropriate modalities to effectively deliver content to your learners.

Our recommendations often include a combination of the following:

Instructional Strategy
A curriculum’s instructional strategy details the manner by which a program meets its stated learning objectives. In many respects the definition of the instructional strategy is not complete until a curriculum is fully articulated.


In defining an instructional strategy we will rely on inputs from other elements discussed here. After all, an instructional strategy is not fully informed without first considering your audience, technical parameters, learning objectives, etc.

To define the instructional strategy we will consider answers to the following questions: 

Time Frame

The most intricately designed curriculum in the world may render itself irrelevant if it fails to meet a client’s needs and respects its constraints.


At a project level, a strategy for curriculum design is most effective when we know when you want your curriculum delivered to learners. Such an analysis also considers the time available for creation and deployment, as solutions often require your team’s input, review, and sign-off at various stages before subsequent tasks can begin.


At the audience level, a strategy for curriculum design must consider learners’ availability to complete learning events. For example, it is important to know answers to the following questions:

Localization Strategy

Is yours one of the companies that increasingly find themselves operating in distributed environments that span time zones and cultures? To ensure that training initiatives reach their targeted audience it is essential that the curriculum is designed with your organization’s broader needs in mind.


We can help you define and implement a localization strategy that considers the following:

Release Strategy

The underlying motivation of many training programs is to affect change within an organization. Whether it targets soft skills like sales-force effectiveness or application-based skills development common in high-tech environments, the effectiveness of training programs relies on how open the audience is to change.


An appropriate release strategy positions training programs as an opportunity to grow and prepares learners to embrace this change. And as programs grow in size and complexity a release strategy becomes critical to a company’s ROI. We can help you create a release strategy that appropriately positions your learning programs to the intended audience and helps gain buy-in from across the organization.


A release strategy includes (but is not limited to) the following considerations: