Writing a course backwards?

All too often, an elearning assessment can end up being, well, an afterthought; something you turn your attention to once everything else is done and dusted. After all, you think, it surely can’t be that difficult to whip up ten multiple-choice questions to stick on the end of your course (unless you’ve ever tried to). But have you ever considered writing your assessment first – before you’ve pulled together any of the content?

If that sounds a bit ridiculous, let’s take a step back and think about the purpose of an elearning course (or any learning material): we want to have an impact on people’s behaviour, skills or understanding. Most of the time, we encapsulate this by writing a few key learning objectives or outcomes; these act as a north star as we build the course, with all the content supporting our learner to achieve them.

If we’re going to include an assessment at the end of the course, it surely should also be strongly linked to these learning outcomes (otherwise, what’s the point of it?). And actually, the act of whittling down those few key questions – to get to the essence of what’s important – can really clarify our thinking.

In Nimble Author, there are a few different assessment question types to choose from:

• Multiple choice (with either one or multiple correct answers)

• Drag and drop (where learners sort cards into the correct categories)

• Text match (where they type the answer, and you set the options that will be marked as correct)

We keep the question types simple for a couple of reasons; first, the learner will hopefully already be familiar with these exercises, because they’ve encountered them during the course. But we’ve also limited the types to make the score easy to calculate, and the assessment results straightforward to analyse. Regardless, you’ll need to spend some time selecting which question type will be the most appropriate for assessing each learning objective. Writing questions that are clear, unambiguous and useful is not an easy task (you’ll find a free session all about it on our webinar channel!).

Next time you’re planning an elearning module, set yourself this challenge:

1. Choose the learning objectives or outcomes (we’d recommend a maximum of five; three is even better! If your course is very long, consider breaking it down into multiple shorter courses to achieve this)
2. Plan the ten key questions you’ll use to check whether your learners have met these learning objectives
3. Now look at the questions you’ve sketched out and use them to structure the course content into topics
4. Start building out the topics, keeping a single learning point the focus of each page (it’s tempting to cram too much in)
5. Keep referring back to the course assessment and outcomes as you write, ruthlessly removing any content that doesn’t add to your learners’ understanding of these points

Why not give this seemingly backwards approach a go? It could help you get to the heart of what you need learners to achieve and provide a logical way to structure your content into topics – with the added benefit of creating a focused, well-written assessment!