Curriculum design that connects the dots

When designing a curriculum, our focus shifts to identifying the topics, which the students need to learn. This is more prominent in the current times where the attention span of our learners is reducing, and curriculum designers are going modular to adapt the design for this modern behavior. We are developing short, microlearning, nuggets, which support the learner demand for just-in-time learning experiences with crisp and clean content delivery.

This approach is great to keep your learners engaged. At the end of the day, some training is better than no training.

However, the sole focus on topic-driven curriculum design makes your curriculum a list of topics, rather than a cohesive learning path that tells a story. The overall learning experience in such cases is similar to the experience we get when we learn from multiple YouTube videos or blogs.

Connecting the Dots During Analysis and Design

So, let’s examine how to address this shortcoming when analyzing and designing your curriculums. To overcome this, after you have a list of lessons or topics ready for your curriculum, consider creating a mind map that represents the relation between the different topics or lessons. Pick lessons that are related. Write notes that explain the relation between the different lessons.

Here is a sample curriculum on effective communication. You can see the curriculum presented as a simple list of items. This may work, but is not as effective as the next design, which presents the relation between the different elements in a more explicit design.

In this example, the relationships between the elements is clearly called out and thus, the learners will know the path they need to follow. Consequently, this path tells some sort of story.

Connecting the Dots for Your Learners

Finally, when you write your courses, make sure that the relationships between the different lessons or courses in the curriculum are called out. This will help your learners to connect the dots between the different courses and topics. This approach also ensures that your entire curriculum tells a story and encourages your learners to take other courses in the curriculum.

Consequently, you keep your learners engaged and deliver a learning experience that is cohesive and effective.

Connecting the Dots on the Learning Path or the Curriculum Plan

To take this experience to the next level, if you have a team or individual who can code web pages, consider presenting your entire curriculum in an interactive way. That is, you can present your curriculum in the form of a tree diagram or a mind map where each box on the path is clickable and launches the respective course. The lines connecting the elements can explain the relation between the different courses. Note that such a design will work where you have a curriculum of five to ten courses. If you need to present a larger number of courses, such a design can get noisy. So, adapt your design if needed.

Here is the mind map that you saw previously. The sample shown here identifies the areas where the learners can be asked to click. Such an interactive curriculum plan gives the learners a visual representation of their learning journey.

We hope this tip helps you to design, develop, and present more effective curriculums. We’d like to thank you for watching this video or reading the blog. Please do subscribe to our channel and blog to stay updated with the assets that we publish.