Cathy Moore has a lovely post with a slideshow that talks about using action mapping to design better elearning, and it’s a really nice approach. While I don’t know from Action Mapping (tm?), I do know that the approach taken avoids the typical mistakes and focuses on the same thing I advocate: what do people need to be able to do?
The presentation rightly points out the problems with knowledge dump, and instead focuses on the business goal first, and then asks you to map out what the learner would need to be able to do to achieve that business goal. That’s the point I was making in my ‘objectives‘ post of the Broken ID series.
Cathy nicely elaborates on that point, going directly to practice that has them doing the task, as close as possible to the real task. Finally, she has you bring in the minimum information needed to allow them to do the task. This is really a great ‘least assistance‘ approach!
Now, it’s not talking about examples or models (though those could fit under the minimum information principle, above), nor introducing the topic, so I’d want to ensure that the learners are engaged into the learning experience up-front, and provide a model to guide their performance in the task. What this does, however, is give you a framework and set of steps that really focuses on the important elements and avoiding the typical approach that is knowledge-full and value-light. Recommended.