DESIGN DILEMMA: YOU DECIDE
The Excel lesson team is working on their lesson design. They have completed their
job analysis and identifined fi ve key steps involved in setting up a spreadsheet. Sergio,
the subject-matter expert, offers the team an outline. “Here”, he says, “let me save
you some time. This is the outline I use when I teach in the classroom. (See Sergio’s
outline in Figure 10.1) It works really well because I teach one step at a time.”
“Thanks, Serg. It really helps to have the content broken out,” Reshmi replies,
“but after I reviewed our job analysis, I came up with a slightly different sequence.
Take a look.” (See Reshmi’s outline in Figure 10.1). After reading Reshmi’s outline,
Sergio reacts: “Wow, Reshmi! I think your outline is confusing. My plan places all of
the key concepts with each step. That way they learn each concept in the context
in which they will use it! We can use that new screen capture tool to run my slides
continuously while the narration plays.” Reshmi is not convinced by Sergio’s argument:
“Yes, but your plan lumps a lot of content together. I think it will overwhelm
people new to Excel—and many of our learners will be new users.”