A simple exercise to kick-start course design with your team

We highly recommend a team approach to course design. Often this involves some sort of a design workshop where you think about what your course should look and feel like and what the learner journey might be.

We love this simple exercise that asks participants about their experience as a learner on a course to get creative ideas and solutions for your own course design. In this exercise we ask participants what they liked, struggled with, and what it made them think about.

The exercise

1. 1-2 weeks before the design workshop, enrol your team as learners in a course (we've got loads of example courses if you need them - just get in touch).
2. On the day of the design workshop, set up 3 "stations". At each station, put a large piece of paper with one of these prompts:
   - I liked...
   - I struggled with...
   - It made me think about...
3. Get your team to distribute themselves evenly(ish) among the stations, give them a few minutes, then signal for them to move to another station. Repeat.
4. Take one piece of paper at a time (we recommend starting with I liked...) and read through the responses aloud to the group. Welcome people to expand on anything they wrote if they'd like to.
5. Ask the group if there are any "themes" within the responses. Circle/label these on the paper.

Here's what that looked like for us.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for I struggled with... but before ending the discussion, take some time to also think about creative solutions to what they struggled with.

7. Repeat the sharing, discussion and theming for the last piece - It made me think about...

It made me think about... should ideally be about what great ideas popped into their head for their own course, but might also be questions that came up for them.

By the end of this exercise, you'll have a whole list of great ideas and solutions to tackle challenges. For us, we thought it would be worthwhile 1-2 of us fleshing it out a little turning it into a resource we could use as we continue to design.

Here's a preview of what we created.

If you're interested, here's the full pdf: Reflecting on our experience as learners in an iQualify course.

Here at iQualify, we try to keep the learner experience at the centre of everything we do. We think this exercise is the perfect warm up for getting into course design. It brings the group together, highlights the great, helps us find solutions for the challenges, and collates a bunch of great ideas for us to carry forth, keeping the learner experience in mind.

If you try it out, we'd love to know how it works for you and your team. And if you need a helping hand with solutions, we're here. Get in touch.