Define the flavour

This is one post in a collection of six, detailing different steps in course planning. See the main Course planning post for links to each of the stages.

Courses come in a whole range of flavours. Some are really collaborative courses where learners spend a lot of time discussing and working in groups. Others are entirely self-paced and unfacilitated, instead your feedback is via automarked tasks. And of course, these two are somewhat at opposite ends of the spectrum, there’s all sorts of other course types in between! 

So courses can offer up some very different experiences for learners. This is what we mean by defining the "flavour" of the course. And, there's no one right flavour. It all depends on your learners, the subject area and your organisation’s context. 

Below we've got a few questions as prompts to help you reflect on what kind of course you're imagining. We group these into questions about use, beliefs/principles, and procedures.

Use - How will learners use this course?

Here’s where you should explain your vision for how learners will use iQualify and any other roles involved in supporting learners through their course.

• Which aspects of learning will be online?
• Which (if any) will be face to face?
• Will learners be encouraged to share or collaborate at any point?
• How will learners be supported (both face-to-face and online) on their journey?
• How regularly will learners be accessing their courses?
• Will the learners be sharing their work or progress with others in any way?
• Will learners' engagement or progress be monitored in any way?

For example:

These courses are blended. Learners will have 1-3 hours per week to dedicate to the online courses and will be enrolled in groups based on their regions.

The online component makes up about 90% of the learning, but contains an optional face to face workshop towards the close of the course. This workshop enables participants to consolidate key aspects of the course through problem-solving activities and also provides a chance to do some face-to-face networking to allow these course connections to continue past the lifetime of the course.

Principles – What do we believe?

• What are your beliefs about how people learn?
• What are your beliefs about how people should be assessed?
• What should drive the learning?
• What conditions are necessary for learning?
• What key relationships or connections are needed?
• What is the learner’s role? The facilitator’s?
• Who makes which decisions about learning?

For example:

We make learning reciprocal – Ako, in te reo Māori, means both to teach and to learn. Ako shows us that learning requires reciprocity – both learners and facilitators learn from one another. This means learners need to be acknowledged as contributors and have safe spaces for them to share what they know. The facilitator is not seen as the “keeper of knowledge”.

Procedures – Is there a “recipe” that content should follow?

• How should each topic begin?
• What elements (e.g. hook, scenario, formative tasks, readings, reflection, communication) should always be included in each topic?
• How frequently should elements occur?
• What order should elements appear in?

For example:

At the start of each course, we prepare learners by introducing them to the topic and answering “what’s in it for me?”. Then we acknowledge learners by including an activity that recalls or gets them to share what they already know about a topic…

Appearance – What will the course look and feel like?

• What modes and multimedia should be incorporated?
• Do you have a vision of what you’d like your learner experience to be like?
• Do you want to use block styles in a consistent way?
• Do you want to follow a particular graphic style or colour scheme?

For example:

The course should look and feel like an extension of our brand. That means using illustrations rather than stock photos of people and using our brand colours (green: #35785d, purple: #b29fc7, and grey: #757475) where possible.

Learners should be able to clearly identify new terminology with a pullout block style with the term bolded.

Defining the "flavour"

Uncover

As with defining your audience, you can brainstorm answers and ideas for these questions with a group. 

We’ve created a set of slides with the questions below so you can just plug and play when you get your team together to brainstorm. 

Analyse

Then, once you’ve answered the questions, see if you can identify themes, requirements and contradictions within your answers. 

For instance, maybe you've said that you believe people learn through trying things out on the job, but your "recipe" doesn't include any activities or reflections to scaffold them into trying things out or reflecting on what they've learned. 

Record

You should record your final answers so that the group involved in creating the courses can use these answers to guide them. 

The way you record your flavour or learning and teaching approach is totally up to you, but here's an example of what defining the learning and teaching approach might look like. Feel free to use this document as a base, and amend it to suit your context.   

You can also see an example of how we went through this process with Playcentre to redesign the courses in one of their qualifications: Playcentre education - Going digital.

What next?

Remember once you've defined your flavour, check it against what you've identified for your target audience (or have a go at completing that step now in Course planning - Identify your audience).

One smaller-scale of "flavour" is the style evident in the text of the course. So, if you're ready to consider this stage check out Course planning - Set the style.