It’s often your first clue – that you are about to experience vanilla-learning, generic content, something next to impossible to figure out how to apply back in your real world.

It’s the sales pitch on learning benefits. It’s necessary because it’s not going to be obvious.

Or it seems obvious – but the difficulty will come later, back on the job, where how to do this successfully enough so that it becomes reinforcing versus extinguishing.

If your Learning Objectives are NOT driven/derived from a “good-enough” understanding of the eventual applications of your assigned TOPIC – then you will need to spend more time selling than teaching and the learners will spend more time being sold than learning.

Oh yes, and you’ll probably have to then sell that selling time as providing a really complete advanced organizer (albeit a poor one).

But there is a way to avoid that: do the analysis to understand the audiences terminal applications back on their job – and assess whether of not you have a good enough understanding of their applications to design content authentic enough.

# # #